Review: Naughty Bear

Naughty Bear, when first announced, gave me a vibe that I’d get from those games I used to play as a kid but shouldn’t have, you know, like Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The games you had to have your friend’s less-righteous-than-your-mother parent to buy at Blockbuster for you because you’re 12. While not nearly as mature as anything like Conker, you can perform some incredibly criminal acts to the seemingly innocent sacks of fluff living on Perfection Island. Oh, if they had just invited me to their birthday party…

The game begins introducing you to the characters like Fluffy, Cuddles, Giggles, Daddles and every other insert Care Bear-esque name bear. Everyone lives on Perfection Island and it’s Daddles’ birthday. Naughty Bear is excited and makes a present to bring to the party but you just get laughed at. You weren’t invited. So the game centers around getting some sweet revenge on everyone.

The game consists of 7 chapters, and each chapter has 5 total challenge levels within it. The first is always the actual story level, followed by four challenge levels which vary for each chapter and are unlocked by scoring a lot of points in other levels. Some of the challenges are to get a certain amount of points without being seen once, or to make all the bears go crazy before killing them, or making sure you kill every bear.

The game is centered around gaining points. Gaining points lets you move past checkpoints. The more points you get in a level, the higher your rating will be when you finish it, i.e. platinum cup, gold cup, silver cup, etc. Earning points is the fun part. These points are called “naughty points.” You’re awarded points for, well, being naughty. Breaking or sabotaging things in the level will net you naughty points. Beating the stuffing out of bears, killing bears, using ultra kills, scaring, surprising and making bears go crazy — will all net you some big points. There are also multipliers you can pick up around the stage to increase your combo gauge. It’s all about combos in Naughty Bear if you want to go home with a nice cup — and you will want to, because you need cups to unlock more challenge levels and also to advance the story chapters.

My two favorite things about the game are the ways you can kill the bears. Aside from picking up weapons such as an alien ray gun, a crowbar, an uzi, a ninja sword or other weapons scattered around the levels to kill and maim with (as well as use them to perform ultra kills using the right trigger after enough damage is dealt for more points), you can do something I like much more - environmental kills. Say you see Daddles bopping around to his disco music at the party while you’re eying him from the bushes. Doesn’t that just make you mad? Well you can stealthily make your way over to him and press the right trigger to smash his head into the turntable to kill him. Or if you see a bear putting something away in the refrigerator, you can push him inside and slam the door to turn him into a popsicle bear. Or even when you catch a bear trying to escape your wrath by trying to get away by boat, you can yank him out of the boat and curb stomp his mouth into the dock.

My other favorite thing to do is you can actually toy with the bears and scare them so much that they go mad. Once they’ve gone mad, you can grab a bear from behind with one last huge scare and they will literally commit suicide. If they’re carrying a gun, they’ll slowly raise the gun to their temple and kill themselves, stab themselves if they have a knife, and if they aren’t carrying anything — they’ll just beat themselves to death right in front of you.

Stealth is actually really important in Naughty Bear. It’s almost like Splinter Cell for furries. Maybe not quite as serious as Sam and his line of work… but all of your kills, combos and the like, though optional, will be best earned by maintaining your cover in the bushes, setting traps, and attacking at the right moment. The speed you walk also makes noise and can alert or surprise nearby bears. You’ll unlock items and hilarious costumes (I love the sheriff costume complete with mustache…) later on that will give you certain bonuses to your stats (damage, accuracy, etc.) and some that will give you abilities such as helping remain covert in your operation.

Though making bears commit suicide and curb stomping their faces had me having fun for a sure while, Naughty Bear is certainly not without its flaws. The stage is literally recycled for every level with slight alterations or time of day changes. It’s still fun to go for the variety of environmental kills all the time, and each chapter has new weapons and ultra kills to experiment with, but the same area every time definitely can get stale. The multiplayer, I don’t even want to describe. It’s totally broken. I’d get server-punted after finally joining four-player matches almost every single time. I got to play maybe three matches total out of 15-ish attempts. The ones I got to work were protect/destroy each other’s statue matches. It was alright, but Naughty Bear could have certainly succeeded and done just as well without even adding the online multiplayer component at all.

I’m not sure if it will handle like this for everyone, but I had two lock-up instances of my Xbox during my extensive play time with the game where I had to turn it off and turn it back on again. The game also has minor slowdowns, which I only encountered when moving to different checkpoint areas of a stage, which didn’t really affect my experience because that sequence is pretty much a loading screen to begin with. My last complaint is when you are going in for a kill there will be instances where the camera angle might get out of place and show you a poor angle of the kill you worked hard for, or graphical issues where there will be some clipping of the bear into an object or into another bear.

Overall, Naughty Bear definitely was a really fun experience. I found myself going in to get higher scores and unlock more levels and costumes many, many times. But once you’ve done all the different types of kills and scares you can commit combined with seeing the recycled stages over and over, some players might find it a bit repetitive. I personally kept going back for more even after I unlocked and completed the campaign because the combo system feels really rewarding once you get the hang of how to get some crazy high scores (plus, leaderboards in this game can be really motivating), but I can definitely see where some players might tire after experiencing all the wacky story chapters - making it really hard for me to score. I gave it a 7/10 based on the enjoyment I had overall when playing and finishing up the game.

Doin’ It RIGHT: - Environment kills are hilarious. - Making bears commit suicide feels incredibly evil. - Feels really rewarding once you get a hang of the combo system.	Doin’ It RONG: - Occasional lock-ups. - Stages are recycled. - Multiplayer is broken.
FINAL SCORE: 7.0 / 10