Your tolerance for Naughty Bear is likely to extend exactly as far as your amusement at the prospect of chasing cuddly-wuddly widdle bears around a candy-coloured village and beating their stupid bear faces in with a baseball bat while all the other bears run around sobbing and howling in grief and horror.

On a mechanical and artistic level, Naughty Bear is content to stop at merely functional, or sometimes not even that. Naughty himself is a fairly graceless object, lumbering around the levels with the arcing speed and nimble elegance of a bath mounted on rollerskates, and the camera hovers awkwardly as if trying to remember why it came here in the first place. Though the unwary may be tempted to view Naughty Bear as an action game, it is really nothing of the sort; instead being a sort of puzzle-game constructed around the simple core mechanic of spreading fear and distress.

Every antisocial action performed will earn you points, and successive actions will build up a score multiplier. By chaining together “naughty” actions both small (smashing a picnic table) and large (disemboweling a weeping bear with a machete) you try to build up as many points as possible before killing the bears living in each area. The longer you keep them alive and suffering, the more points you acquire. Eventually a bear will snap under the strain and go insane. At this point they will begin to wander aimlessly around, staring into space and babbling to himself. He’ll be lost in a lonely dream world where he’s happy and everything is all right and he’s not about to get his head staved in by a psychotic pervert teddy bear on a torture-rampage. Frighten an insane bear one more time and he will commit suicide.

The repetitive nature of these screenshots should give you some idea of the limited range of the game itself

The game therefore comes down to a balancing act between keeping the bears alive and in terror and keeping the multiplier as high as possible. Each of these levels can then be replayed under challenge mode conditions, which include having to drive all bears insane, or complete the level without using a weapon. There is a certain, limited, pleasure to this in short bursts. There’s also some moderately amusing touches to be discovered, but it fails to compel at any length, especially given the limited variety of weapons and environments involved (the box cover threatens us with further downloadable content).

The repetitive nature of these screenshots should give you some idea of the limited range of the game itself

Additional multiplayer modes are included; seemingly more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. But in their necessary shifting of emphasis onto the game’s creaky combat mechanics, they undermine the only particularly appealing aspect of the whole package. Modes like Cakewalk (carry a delicious cake to the goal while under assault from a rival team) and Golden Oozy (one bear has a devastating submachine gun and must fend off hordes of attackers) all-too-quickly devolve into a frenzied bundle of running round in random circles desperately jabbing the attack button in the hope of killing something.

The whole lacklustre business of attempting to compete against other people vigorously underlines one stark, simple fact: Naughty Bear is a game constructed around a single joke, and it’s not one that bears much repetition. In its best moments it manages to be faintly reminiscent of Rockstar’s tremendous, grubby, killsploitation title Manhunt, but without that game’s mechanical delicacy, pervasive sense of dread or wry satirical bite. As Manhunt showed, there’s nothing essentially wrong with being a one-trick pony, but it had better be a pretty great trick.

Review Round-Up

Graphics 2/5 – Adequate to the task, but lacking in any real flourish or vision in its art design.

Sound 3/5 – Sound effects are uninteresting and music unmemorable. The children’s television-style narrator is faintly amusing (I enjoyed his cry of “You nutter!” upon earning a platinum medal) and wisely not over-used.

Story 1/5 – No, not really.

Gameplay 2/5 – Repetitive and unimaginative with a turgid camera and clumsy main character, yet somehow oddly compelling in short bursts. Some of the death animations are amusing the first time you see them. Online multiplayer is, of course, arbitrarily included, but it’s rubbish. Mention must also be made of the fact that the game in its current form suffers from frequent game-crashing glitches that should shame whoever was supposed to be responsible for QA.

Longevity 2 /5 - Little incentive to carry on with it beyond manic completion-ism or achievement hunting. After the first level, you’ve effectively seen everything this has to offer.

[starreview tpl=16]

Overall 2 Ruined Parties out of 5 – You know how magistrates and tabloid columnists talk about videogames as morally-reprehensible murder simulators? They were dead wrong until this came out. It is, however, too clumsily implemented and frankly too boring to be described as any kind of moral menace. It achieves a borderline competence as a score-attack game, but you’re frankly better off with the sublime Manhunt or even Swordfish studios’ underrated The Club, both of which pull off the dystopian spree-killer genre with the kind of grisly panache that this clumsy effort probably couldn’t even spell.

- Elliot Mears