The Bee Hive Review

Bees in games are one of my many obsessions that I can’t help but be drawn towards; they always have such cute designs for such a fun insect. This is one of the reasons The Bee Hive caught my attention, despite looking a bit rough around the edges at first glance. However, since it was created by one person over nine years and is inspired by classic platformers such as Spyro the Dragon, I thought it at least had earned itself a whirl.

The Bee Hive is a 3D platformer where you play as a courageous bee named Honeybee who is tasked with saving the Insect Kingdom, requiring you to obtain elemental stones from various locations after they were split into pieces and scattered by the spiders. No one knows why the spiders did it, but it’s your job to bring back balance.

There is a nostalgic feel woven in, and the enemies have somewhat interesting mechanics and differences when fighting them, but when it comes to actually playing The Bee Hive, it’s…frustrating. The camera is weird, bugs and glitches abound, and you can’t actually see what’s in the journal pages you collect. Most of the time, I didn’t know what I was doing; it felt like I was aimlessly exploring to achieve some vague objective I wasn’t privy to. I collected the various coloured gems and gears and brought them to a certain character as broadly instructed, but there is no tutorial or exposition telling you what the point of what you’re doing is. There are in-game tips telling you to press buttons, but these hints would not disappear after I clearly pressed the needed button, and I was left staring at the tip long after it was useful.

Spiders are fighters

When it comes to combat, a green honeycomb ring was helpful during fights as it shows how much damage you’ve done to an enemy. The ring will slowly turn red in parts each time you hit enemies, and once it’s fully red, they’re dead. However, combat in general was confusing, and I found myself button-mashing at times just to get by. Once I did figure it out, it still wasn’t exactly satisfying to engage in the game’s clunky fisticuffs. The camera did not help this at all, being unaware of how to capture the action in whatever mode you choose. The camera goes wherever the wind takes it (including under the map) regardless of whether you opt to control it directly or let it follow the character without your input. In a strange inversion of expectation, once I unlocked being able to go underwater, the camera was smoother and performed better, but it’s still hard to forgive its general sins.

Weirdly enough, for an insect that has wings, Honeybee cannot fly, only glide. The only time I could fly was when I talked to one of the NPCs, Lovebug the Ladybird, who physically holds Honeybee so you can fly or use its hot air balloon. And for Honeybee to learn how to pollinate, I needed to give Dasher the Snail gemstones to unlock the ability, which I also found strange, as I would expect a bee to know already how to do this.

The one of many glitches

In fact, the camera is at the heart of many glitches. At one point in the game at the home location, I kept glitching up into the sky and couldn’t stop or go down, even when pressing the reload button. Only when I changed the camera did I suddenly find myself back on the ground, but I then could not use the passive camera because it kept shooting underground, giving me no proper angle to see what was going on. I also experienced dialogue glitches that kept me stuck talking with most NPCs for an extended period, specifically with Mr Spider, hearing dialogue over and over, even when I wasn’t pressing, with the characters themselves disappearing at the same time. These game-breaking issues happened throughout my entire time playing, and I found myself looking at the settings far longer than I would have liked, trying to figure out if I could brute force a fix to the issues.

On a positive note, the upbeat, quirky soundtrack featured in The Bee Hive was personally my favourite feature throughout my time playing, being fun and fitting the general vibe. It even has a dedicated music room to play selected songs from worlds you have been in, and as you explore you’ll find more tracks to bop along to (Amazonia is my jam). On the flipside, when it comes to voice acting it’s awkward to listen with its ill-fitting, robotic nature. The dialogue is overly protracted when a simpler phrase could be used, and big chunks of text will show up for subtitles, covering characters on the screen. Not exactly conducive to staying engaged in the forest’s happenings.

Hand-drawn info

Visually, The Bee Hive features blocky characters and seemingly unfinished-looking locations. I personally didn’t care for Honeybee’s design,  however the enemy spiders and butterflies looked pretty neat. In a charming twist, the cutscenes and loading screens in The Bee Hive feature clearly hand-drawn texta illustrations which took me back to primary school a little.

Final Thoughts

Despite giving it the benefit of the doubt after first seeing it, The Bee Hive is a disappointing, lukewarm experience that I most likely will not be returning to. I was rooting for this solo developer, but there are too many ideas and a game trying to be too many things, while not succeeding at being any of them. I can see the potential in this game, but unfortunately in its current state it is hard to recommend.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch // Review code supplied by publisher

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