Naughty Bear

Naughty Bear held particular interest to me as I have a certain nostalgia when it comes to the combined ingredients of children and killer bears.

It's not because I currently enjoy setting bears on children that talk during movies and cry in my favourite Viking restaurant (The Longship - Bar and Grill), no, my nostalgia comes from a different place...my childhood...my childhood...my childhood...dramatic flashback...

On a boy Vikings 5th birthday he is put in a ring with a Tædjkse Bear (now known as a teddy bear, and thus this story has already related back to the game). A Tædjkse Bear is about five foot, born rabid, weighs approximately 500 kilos, and usually has an abandonment complex and will blame the nearest living thing for the fact that mamma or pappa bear left him with only his razor sharp claws and iron teeth to defend him against a large and cruel world.

If the Viking child defeats the bear, in whatever manner, then he is accepted into Viking society. If he doesn't, the child becomes an outcast, and is shipped off to another country to begin an awful existence where he is scorned by the public, his soul to be tormented in his every waking moment, his brain to slowly degrade as he strives through a life of monotony and servitude. When Vikings pray to Odin, the first thing we thank him for is avoiding this fate, because there is nothing, NOTHING, worse than life as a sales rep.

My fight with the Tædjkse bear has gone down in Viking history as the greatest moment EVER. I still remember being pushed unceremoniously in the pit, a tiny 7ft five year old Viking, holding an axe in each hand, my (wicked) beard hiding my fist shaped chin, ready to take my place in Viking society.

Due to some Vikings messy writing on an ordering form, the bear that was pushed into the pit with me was only half a Tædjkse bear. I'm not saying it was only half of one, as if he'd been cut in two or something, that's stupid, learn to read. This bear was half Tædjkse, half Kodiak, and all bad-arse. The bear, (even though insanely rabid) was extremely intelligent and had heard his fate being discussed through his titanium enclosure, and used his laptop he had snuck in with him to buy weapons off eBay.

So a huge, 6 foot, 682 kilo rabid, insane, intelligent bear was pushed into the ring, samurai swords taped to both of his paws, brass knuckles around his kransky sized digits, and twin nunchuks on his shoulders as back-ups should his swords break on my nose.

There was a pause as the bear looked up into my eyes, and it was then, in this moment, that the bear saw his true master. The bear bowed, and I tilted my head towards him, recognising his deference. I climbed onto his back and he clambered out of the pit, and using him as a steed he took me to his bear people, where I learned the Dragon Punch from one of the bear elders. But that's another story (that should be bought by Disney, because I managed to unite the bear with his pappa who abandoned him, and we all learnt a lot about love, family and friendship along the way).


Anyway, Naughty Bear was a huge disappointment, unlike my story.

In Naughty Bear, we are dropped into a world of teddy (not Tædjkse) bears, where there are cakes and birthdays and parties and allll the innocence you could expect from creatures stuffed with wool.

We play as (however aptly named) Naughty Bear. Naughty, who was not invited to go to Daddles birthday, makes him a present and decides to give it to him anyway. On the way the other bears laugh at Naughty and his gift, and Naughty, sad and embarrassed, runs home. Our British narrator tells Naughty that he should punish the bears that teased him and teach Daddles a lesson, and thus begins the psychotic rampage that is the game Naughty Bear.

Despite Naughty Bear being fairly dissapointing, there are some things about this game I love. First off, it plays like a kids game. The environments are bright and colourful and there are jelly cakes and balloons and the gameplay feels kinda like Spyro or Crash Bandicoot. You know the gameplay, the one that lets you know that dying isn't so bad, to just keep collecting those emeralds you little tike! Just replace 'collecting emeralds' with 'dismembering fellow teddies' and that's the feeling of this game.

There are four ways to kill other teddies. You can beat them or slash them to death, injure them enough and have a special kill (which are dependant on the weapon you're armed with at the time and are often hilariously brutal or savage), you can sabotage equipment or set up traps (like bear traps {haha}) and then sneak up on them for the kill (once again varied, brutal and hilarious), or finally, and best, scare a teddy into insanity in which they will use whatever they can to kill themselves.

While these events are gratifying in an unsusual and somewhat disturbing way, once you get passed the death sequences the game isn't offering me much more. Unfortunately, to progress through the story you must earn a certain amount of points to get trophies which will unlock later levels. In essence you HAVE to do the missions to do the main storyline. Usually I would have no problem with this, but as it's fairly hard to complete these missions, I just find it frustrating and ultimately not worth my time.

The reason it's hard to complete these missions is because there is way to exploit a pattern in the gameplay, all is chaos. If the missions objective is to avoid being hit, then surely the level design should permit me to sabotage x amount of equipment or set x amount of traps to kill x teddies without being spotted, because once spotted, one teddy tells all the other teddies and then they arm themselves and come after you. If you try to just straight up kill them, and quickly, you will undoubtedly get spotted by another teddy due to the fact there are no exploitable patterns, and then this other teddy will run off to tell all the other teddies who will arm themselves and come after you.

So missions where you have to avoid being hit and can only perform one hit kills on the other teddies becomes almost impossible, and is really WAY too much to expect from a player who bought the game simply to hack and slash at childrens toys.

The two most disappointing things about the game are that you can't really choose how you kill the other bears and that the game fails at letting you bring true terror into the lives of fellow teddies.

In the former circumstance, in a storyline level where I the ultimate goal is to kill a certain bear, I figure I should be able to, if I wanted, kill all the bears by sabotage or scare them all into killing themselves. Once again, the gameplay doesn't have exploitable patterns that allows me to choose how I kill these bears. I have tried several times to do so, and each and every time turns into a violent rampage. Anyone that has played the first few Grand Theft Autos will tell you how quickly mindless rampages become boring. As a Viking I can't get enough of mindless rampages, hell, it's what pays my way in the world. But as I continually state, a game is a place for me to do things I don't normally do (even though I habitually scare people into killing themselves).

In the latter, I initially believed Naughty Bear would allow me to play as the terrifying psycho killer, in which by stalking my pray, injuring them over and over again, scaring them and setting traps for them, I would eventually either drive my victim insane or kill them in a brutal manner that would scare other teddies that found the corpse.

The game is set where there are jelly cakes and butterflies and DURING THE DAY. Not exactly your average psychotic killers home ground. The game does give you points for walking passed windows, giving your victim a glimpse of the killer and scaring them further, but that's about as far as it goes in terms of trying to capture the essence of being terrifying.

Lastly, the game is fairly laggy at times. This annoys me immensely, as I bought it on the PS3, and technically, the PS3 is supposed to (technically) be the more powerful of the two systems (PS3/Xbox 360). If it's not the machines fault, it's the game developers fault. If you're going to release a game, and a game that is by no means great, at least don't further enrage me by making it laggy.

Naughy Bear is fun but ultimately lacks the mechanics to make me want to play it more than a few times every couple of weeks. If you find a cheap copy definitely pick it up to enjoy killing teddies, but apart from that, let it rest for a while and bury yourself in Demon's Souls like I've done.

I give Naughty Bear 2.5 out of 5 torn off and mutilated teddy bear heads.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.