![]() It's all quite wholesome, and the mood is both cheerful and a little silly. Eventually you'll scout about for a new hive site. A hornet attacks the nest, and you have to hold it off until the hive can organise a bee ball (which, as far as I know, is something only Japanese honey bees do, but hey). You waggle dance to learn from other bees where particularly good patches of flowers are. You're gathering pollen because the hive needs food for winter. ![]() ![]() It all feels a bit like an educational cartoon. The whole business is generally as lightweight as possible, and as I twirl my bee necklace between my fingers (the sign of a committed bee fan), I admit that this makes sense for the tone the game's going for. The fights and races get a bit repetitive, but there aren't that many, and none last very long. One of the races seemed to slightly glitch on me, but other than that, there's not much to say about them. These tasks tend to resolve with minigames: directing lost bees with waggle dances (games of Simon), collecting from specific types of flower, fighting bees and rival wasps (straightforward rhythm challenges), and a few chases. You'll go to spots marked on your screen and talk to other bees, who'll tell you more about how being a bee works, or ask for help with tasks. These take you (a bee) through a little story about the hive coming under threat from humans, and needing to find a new place to move to. Mostly though, you'll be following story quests. Shift or shoulder buttons boost your speed using "beetro", which you can replenish by sitting on sugary food. A tap of the '1' key (or the right thumbstick on controller) activates bee vision, which highlights rarer flowers in a nice compound eye effect. This is easily done by touching one of hundreds of haloed flowers on the map, and there's a gentle buzz (accidental pun, but I'm not changing it) to be had from slowly topping up your reserves before emptying it all out back at the hive. After a brief tutorial and story introduction, you're free to explore and, as mentioned already, your main job is to gather pollen. They've created a large and pretty park to bee about in, with its own zoo, boating lake, and miniature funfair, and buzzing around it all is a delight. Varsav Game Studio really emphasise the micro perspective through which you see the world as a bee, and that's definitely the game's greatest strength. It's not what I wanted it to be, but then that's fair enough, as it wasn't trying to be. But even the simplest premise can drive a game in multiple, wildly different directions, and this one didn't end up going down the track I hoped it might. Honestly, that was enough to pique my interest in the game. You play as a honey bee, in Bee Simulator, and you must gather pollen. ![]() But this is not, in the strictest sense, a simulation of being an insect. This is more of of a Family Bee Adventure, and that's. Let's get it out of the way: "Bee Simulator" is a misnomer. Glancing down at the bee ring on my finger as I clicked away in the web, I began to realise that perhaps - bee fan though I was - I wasn't quite who Bee Simulator was aimed at. well, you escape, but you're dizzy for a minute. You get a long time limit while a presumably hungover spider slowly spirals toward you, during which you have to click while a fluctuating bar is in the green. Here though, albeit seen from the other point of view, it's a lot less scary. And if you caught a bee, you had to cut it loose in a panic before it could hurt you or damage your web. There was a game in a magazine I had as a kid, you see, where you played as a spider. I flew into a cobweb to see what would happen.
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