![]() Flying in a less open environment feels extremely erratic and imprecise though it can be a joy to move around in the more open environments of the park, the hive and other more restricted areas can be somewhat frustrating. Though this all sounds fine enough, unfortunately, there are a number of issues with Bee Simulator. Rounding it all off is a lovely soundtrack – by no less than Mikolaj Stroinski, composer of The Witcher 3 and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter – which adds to the playful sense of wonder inherent in much of the game. The final type of mini-game is the race, in which you’ll need to fly through checkpoints with precision and often at great speed it’s quite a contrast to the laidback, easygoing nature of the rest of the game. Another mini-game you’ll encounter is the waggle dance – also a rhythm action game – but instead of button presses, you’ll instead need to copy the movement sequence of the bee you’re trying to communicate with. There's a wide variety of flowers to discover and players will also engage in combat mini-games against other insects, such as wasps combat in Bee Simulator is presented as a very simple rhythm action exercise in which you’ll make timed button presses in order to defeat your opponent. ![]() Passing through an amber-coloured circle above a flower collects its pollen, which you’ll only be able to carry a limited amount of before needing to take it back to the hive. The humans your bee encounters throughout the story speak in a kind of garbled gobbledegook, not unlike the language heard in games such as The Sims.Ī click of the right stick shifts the view into first-person ‘bee vision’, which helpfully highlights waypoints and objects that can be interacted with, colour coding things such as flowers to denote their rarity. There’s a nice sense of scale – even inside the hive – as well as a wonderful ambience, due to the sounds of nature that you’ll hear. Your newly-transformed insect is then shepherded through a quick flying tutorial by a very matronly bee, before setting off to meet the Queen and leave the hive for the first mission. There’s a nice animated intro as well the game starts with your little bee emerging from her larval form, at which point you can name her (the game suggests a Bee-related pun, but this can be immediately changed). Set in a stylised world based on New York’s Central Park – albeit a nicely-idealised version inspired by the actual location, rather than attempting to truly replicate it – the main story mode of Bee Simulator sees players buzzing around in the role of a honey bee, collecting nectar for the hive. With Bee Simulator, we have a title that does take itself somewhat seriously – even offering some educational facts along the way, in the intro and loading screens, regarding the lifecycle of the bee and their importance to our environment – but, as with titles such as Goat Simulator, it does aim to be a more traditional game, too. The adorably stupid and surprisingly fun, GTA-with-caprines chaos of Goat Simulator seemed to kickstart an interest in oddball ‘Simulator’ games, however, light-heartedly mocking the seriousness of ‘real’ simulators and spawning countless, increasingly bizarre imitators of its own ( Grass Simulator and Shower With Your Dad Simulator 2015 being two PC-based oddities that use the simulator name, but have very little in common with a traditional sim, or even Goat Simulator itself). There are stories going as far back as the '80s of people making real-time transatlantic journeys in flight simulator games, for example, which most certainly doesn’t sound like the kind of experience that most gamers are looking for. Though low budget and often lacking from a visual standpoint in terms of graphical bells and whistles, the immersion and realism was all that players wanted. If a game had ‘Simulator’ in the title, it was a clear sign that it’d be an admirably straight-faced experience, with a focus on the most minor, granular detail. For many years, simulator games were previously the preserve of uber-serious players, keen to try out loving recreations of pastimes that could charitably be called dull.
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