Naughty Bear

Looking for a fluff-filled action game to play? Then you might have heard of Naughty Bear. The game itself was developed by Artificial Mind and Movement and was published by 505 Games. Comparisons to are pretty numerous, with all manner of games of the era following a similar-ish approach to action-adventure. At its heart, though, the game follows something akin to what you might expect from Bully. Is it any good, though? Or has the decade-plus since release made its stitching show through a little too much?

Fluffy thrills for all?

The game itself is set in a fictional version of the 1980s on an island called Perfection Island. Everything is good: the bears are happy, and everyone lives in peaceful charm. It’s like what we imagine a kids toy shop looks like once the shutters go down at night. However, you take the role of Naughty Bear; a shabby little bear who likes to be evil and do things the wrong way.

The other bears tend to shun him, and so he decided that he might decide to try and make things a little, well, rough for the rest of the bears. It’s narrated by someone with the devilish charm of a child with an imagination gone wild, and it makes the whole thing sound like a kind of kids TV show…that no child would ever watch lest they wish to shred their innocence.

A sign of the unimaginative times

Despite having a comical idea behind it, the game itself flatters to deceive in just about every way imaginable. The game itself was received in rather lukewarm fashion upon arrival, and has done little to improve that feedback since then.

The game has an interesting world and some unique characters, but its actual gameplay feels stodgy and wooden. It’s comically fun for about an hour but the game becomes quite repetitive and loses much of its charm. The game lacks unicity in the visuals, too, with lots of repeated areas and a real lack of innovation when it comes to building a more diverse world.

The ‘mayhem’ that you are supposed to be causing, too, is very limited in imagination and in terms of the end results. While most of the time you are doing little other than trying to best your previous high score, its control scheme makes it hard to build any fluency or consistency to the way that you play the game.

Pros:

• Funny idea with an interesting premise

Cons:

• The premise itself falls flat on its face
• Poor quality controls and awful camera angles
• Lacks polish and can quickly become very repetitive