THE BUG QUESTION: SHOULD YOU MAKE A BEELINE FOR BEE SIMULATOR?
REBECCA STOW
PUBLISHER BIGBEN INTERACTIVE / DEVELOPER VARSAV GAME STUDIOS / RELEASE DATE OUT NOW / COST £34.99/$39.99
Planet Earth needs the honeybee. Crops depend on worker bees to pollinate them, yet our tiny allies live difficult and perilous lives. Bee Simulator puts you in a worker bee’s busy shoes and pits you against all that’s threatening the honeybee’s humble existence.
The main goal of Bee Simulator is to do what bees do best: collect lots of nectar before returning to the hive so it can be processed into delicious honey. Luckily, the city park around your avatar’s hive is overgrowing with bright, nectar-filled flowers, all of differing types and rarities. Each variant of flower is sorted into distinct categories which can be seen by activating Bee Vision, with different colourations signalling which nectar is the premium variety. By pressing the right stick you’ll trigger your first-person Bee Vision, allowing you to take in what is an impressively detailed world through much smaller eyes than you’re used to.
In fact, Bee Simulator’s world is so vast and plentiful that traversing it as a tiny bee is a tall order. Flying back and forth between the hive, flowerbeds and the urban sprawl can be time-consuming, but thankfully the developers at Varsav Game Studios have considered this and incorporated ‘Beetro Boost’ to speed up travel time. Keep an eye on the blue meter at the bottom of the screen, and when the bar is full you can hold down RB to receive a boost that will allow your bee to zoom through the air. Over time your Beetro Boost will deplete, so it’s important to save your limited acceleration power for important trips and challenges, or to top it up with the odd sip of nectar.
Earning your stripes
As you spend more time with the game, you’ll become dependent on exchanging messages with other worker bees in order to locate the rarest flowers, or even to pass on a warning about potential dangers threatening the hive. Just like honeybees do in real life, you’ll need to communicate through waggle dancing. By pressing the directional buttons on the D-pad you can emulate the movements of your fellow drones, with each movement meaning something specific, and mistakes are comparable to a garbled sentence. Waggle dancing also earns you Knowledge Points, which you can spend back at the hive to better understand the world around you.
Sadly, some of your interactions within this world won’t be as pleasant as others. There are several insects sharing your airspace and not all of them are friendly. Your most
