Publisher: 505 Games
Developer: Artificial Mind and Movement
Genre: Action
Release date: Available now

You’ve had a long, hard day at work. You’re tired. You’re frustrated. Your boss is a tool. Your lunch exploded in the office cafeteria’s microwave. And after fighting your way home through the traffic jam caused by some idiot who couldn’t stay in the same lane more than two minutes, you find cat poop in your favorite gaming chair. You know you can’t go postal on your employer (or on Fluffy, for that matter), but you’ve still got one way to achieve balance: you can hack up cartoon teddy bears with a samurai sword. This blessed release is thoughtfully provided by publisher 505 Games’ new actioner, Naughty Bear.

Welcome to Perfection Island, home to a tiny colony of colorful teddies—and one mean, nasty, tattered old bear named, appropriately enough, Naughty Bear. Naughty’s something of a Frankenstein’s monster, with his menacing, beady eyes, his half-chewed-off ear, and the rows of stitches on his back and face that barely hold in his stuffing. Naughty never learned how to work and play well with others, so he’s been exiled to a secluded hut in the center of the island, all alone. One day, the other bears have a birthday party, and everyone is invited—except Naughty. He’s sad about being excluded from all the fun, so he decides to make a present and take it to the party anyway (they have to let him stay if he brings a gift, right?). But when he arrives, all the other bears taunt him and laugh at him, driving him back to his hut in disgrace. But then, something inside Naughty snaps. He grabs the nearest sharp implement and proceeds to go all Jackie Chan on his not-so-nice neighbors’ fuzzy butts. (Remember, kids—if someone brings a present, always let them stay at your party).

Naughty Bear is a third-person action game in which your sole mission is to bring the pain in as many evil and explicit ways as possible. The game includes seven stages, during which you earn points for finding and destroying collectible items, obliterating everything breakable in your way, and scaring and killing Naughty’s brightly colored tormentors. In each stage there are challenge levels, which throw a twist into the gameplay. There’s a stealth challenge (complete objectives without being seen more than five times), an insanity challenge (drive all of the bears bonkers), and a few others. As your path of destruction widens, a score multiplier grows with it; grabbing special blue gems on the ground freezes the multiplier for a few seconds, giving you the chance to pile on the points. At preset score levels, you’re awarded trophies (Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum), but to keep the trophies you have to complete the objectives given to you in each level and return to your hut in one piece. As your trophy collection increases, new levels are unlocked, as are special hats and costumes that give Naughty extra speed, strength, and the ability to walk unnoticed among the other bears, at least until the carnage begins.

A word of advice: keep any impressionable youngsters away from Naughty Bear. The fatalities you visit upon these teddies can be really gruesome. You crush skulls with baseball bats, cleave heads with axes, break necks from behind with legs of lamb, tee off on craniums with your favorite titanium driver, and fill enemies with lead from Uzis (known in-game as Oozys) and Magnums. And that’s just a sample of the mayhem you’ll generate to keep the points flowing. The graphics are all very cartoony, and the game avoids a Mature rating by substituting fluff for blood. None of the bears speak, except for some cute, high-pitched squeaks that can sometimes sound like words. The only real dialogue comes from the somewhat annoying, British-accented narrator, who sets up each new stage and gleefully describes each new kill, leading to “Total Defluffication!” when all of your enemies are dispatched.

This would all be fine (in a twisted, Charlie Manson kind of way) if the game wasn’t so threadbare. There are only three maps, so once you learn them, that’s most of the surprise gone. The challenges range from really simple (“Kill Them All!”) to really boring (scare them into suicide) to really frustrating (wipe them out without taking any damage yourself). Frustration is compounded by the lack of a mid-level save feature; you could spend a half hour or more working your way through a level, only to be sent back to square one by a single bullet or by hitting an enemy by accident. There are noticeable graphics slowdowns and a serious clipping problem, which allows bears to walk through doors and other bears. Weapons range from the mundane (pistols) to the creative (umbrellas and cricket bats), but none of the handguns are particularly effective; I emptied an entire 50-round clip into a single bear, to no avail. There’s no progress meter, so there’s no way to know how close you are to reaching the next trophy. But the biggest in a long list of problems is the trophy system used to unlock new stages and levels. Your trophy tally is the lone criteria for progress; if you finish a level with a bronze or a silver trophy, you’ll most likely have to replay it at some point to get gold or platinum. For example, to play the final level in the game, you have to get gold trophies in 25 of the previous 34 levels. All this really does is artificially extend the life of a game that’s already drowning in boring repetition.

Naughty Bear starts out great, with its macabre sense of humor and the creative ways available to eliminate your enemies. But it doesn’t take too long to experience everything that the game has to offer, leaving you with little reason to methodically bang your way to the gold and platinum trophies required to get to the end. Sure, the developer adds robo-bears, zombears (no joke!) and invading aliens, but they’re all dropped into the same three environments and defeated in the same ways. Naughty Bear‘s great as a stress-reliever, but as a game it loses its stuffing much too soon.

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