Now this is a game that I truly never would have even thought to try out, let alone purchase, if it wasn't for the fact that it is already included in my PS-Plus membership. There are very few games out there that have "simulator" in the name of the game that I have actually enjoyed and while this one is not as bad as some of the others, it still fails to really hold my attention outside of the obligatory 1-hour of playtime.
That being said, it is a decent game and I find no fault in the design. There just isn't a whole lot that you can actually do with a game of this magnitude.
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When I see that games like this exist I start to think that maybe we have already made everything that can possibly be made. Just as it is really difficult to come up with an original idea for a film, doing so for video games must be just as hard.
You start the game out as a baby bee in a hive and you are given an actually quite informative and pretty rapid tutorial on how to fly, boost, use your "bee vision" as well as land on other honeycomb hives.
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I really enjoyed the "bee vision" as it allows you to see the plants that are rich in pollen because the plants are rare. This would probably be a lot MORE interesting to people that are completionists because the purple plants are considered "legendary" and as you would expect, are far more rare.
There isn't much to the controls and none of it is terribly complicated. Of course we need to keep in mind that I only played this game for an hour and perhaps things become much more complicated later. I can't imagine that they do though. Instead, what I fear is that various missions just become more tedious and by the time my hour was up I was already encountering this when there was another "sick" bee that I had to follow and it was really easy to lose track of where you were supposed to fly. It was one of those typical fly through the rings to follow the other bee type of tracks and if you got too far "bee" - hind you had to start the entire race over. I was pretty frustrated by the time I finally got through it and can imagine that this same tactic is likely used over and over as the game progresses.
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Fighting is quite humorous and functions like Guitar Hero would in that you just need to hit a sequence of buttons in order to succeed. Of course none of your opponents actually die even though they are insects.
The voice acting is done reasonably well but honestly, I think it was overused. At least it is all able to be skipped if you get tired of it the way that I did.
I think that when you consider that it probably isn't very easy to come up with a story about a beehive that they did a pretty good job with this. You are given missions by the queen of the hive time and time again and this includes threats from humans and you and the other bees have to fight them off somehow. They don't include the fact that you will die if you actually sting any of them, as a bee.
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Imagine if you will, a game that is like a flying first-person-shooter that doesn't involve actually shooting anything. That is Bee Simulator in a shell. While this game is far from terrible, I think that if I was required to play this game to completion that I would not bee very happy about that because after 1-hour, was totally ready to switch this one off and never play it again.
Nice for a bit! But gets old pretty quick!
Games I have already tried in my journey to play at least 1-hour of every PS-Plus Extra game
- Gravity Rush 2 (action adventure game with fast movement in every direction. It has RPG elements and a pretty decent story. Make it past the first hour and the game really opens up. Recommended)
- Oddworld: Soulstorm (2D+ platformer with great graphics, sound, and voice-acting. Unfortunately it is plagued with a lot of repetition. Recommended for a few hours)
- Bee Simulator (sort of like a flying FPS game but with no combat. It's graphically impressive and filled with tidbits of knowledge about bees... unfortunately it just isn't very fun and gets boring fast. Not recommended)
All other games I have already reviewed (there are a lot of them)