Bee Simulator Review

In my personal opinion, bees are among the coolest insects on the planet and with so many other simulators like Goat Simulator, Farming Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator, and Flight Simulator thus, I was very excited to review Bee Simulator when it was given to me.

Bee Simulator is played in a third person view and is a free roaming flight game. When I started the game, two things immediately stood out to me in Bee Simulator. One was that this game is probably better suited for younger kids under the age of 10 years old and the other was the random fun facts that the loading screens had. These facts were actually quite interesting to read about and gave me the impression that the developers of the game really wanted to promote the importance of bees. The opening sequence even talked about how human intervention and advancements have both directly and indirectly lead to a decrease in population of honeybees. The loading screen pictures are also hand-drawn beautifully.

I was thrust into the role of a honeybee that was recently born. Instead of coming up with my own name, I went with one of the game’s default names which contained “bee” in it somehow. The tutorial had an older bee show me how to gather pollen and fly inside the hive. Gathering pollen was done by simply flying past circles above the flowers, which by the way, is not at all how gathering pollen and nectar is done in real life. But hey, this was a video game so I gave it some leeway. There was also something called “bee vision” which changed the view of the world into ultraviolet colors and makes the flowers stand out more by having the flowers “glow” certain colors depending on rarity.

The graphics themselves were not too terrible but they were not amazing either. It reminded me of what the graphics would look like if I was playing back in 2012. There were some weird pop-ins with people or objects. That being said, it was extremely peaceful to be flying around and exploring the world around me. The world is absolutely massive and seems to go on forever but that could just be because the bee was so small so everything looked humongous to it.

There were also mini-games that can be played. Depending on the difficulty setting, these mini-games can vary in how they were played. For example, the battle mini-game in which I battled against wasps, on easy difficulty, I just had to push the corresponding buttons as they appeared. But on hard difficulty, I had to actually guess directions to attack or block. Honestly, the harder difficulty was not that hard and was actually a lot of fun. Other mini-games included bee dancing in which bees give directions to each other, racing, gathering challenges, and stinging. Again, these mini-games are somewhat related to how a bee would act in the real world but with some given liberties. For example, bees will die once they have stung someone or something yet I was able to constantly sting someone multiple times. Not only that, the person I stung will only grunt in pain and that was it. In the real world, most people will freak out and cry in pain. I will also say that each mini-game showcased just how horrible the controls in Bee Simulator were.

Let me just say that I usually have my sensitivity up quite high when I play games. However, with Bee Simulator, I had to turn my sensitivity to the lowest setting and it still was not enough to combat the overly sensitive controls. This could not be more prominent than in the racing mini-games. In these mini-games, I had to fly through circles in a given path. However, the bee cannot turn easily and will constantly crash into walls. Not only that, when I crashed, I would sometimes be flipped upside down and get very disoriented. There was one part of the main quest where I spent over an hour just trying to complete the damn race. This was not limited to just racing, however. Even in the dancing mini-games, I had to move my joystick into the direction that the other bee moves to mimic them. However, I had to memorize the pattern each time and if I messed up, I had to start over from the beginning. I cannot count the number of times the game said I moved my joystick up when I clearly moved it to the right.

The other grievance that I had with the game was the voice acting. Holy hell the number of bee puns. At first, the bee puns were hilarious but eventually it just became annoying. The voice actors also sounded like they were just trying too hard to sound different for every character and used stereotypical accents. I never understood why, but it always seemed like evil characters have an American southern accent which is what Bee Simulator decided to give to the wasps. However, the primary language that was spoken can be changed. I tried the Chinese audio since it was the only other language I can somewhat fluently speak and it was not too bad. I suppose it may have been just the American English accents that were overly forced.

Overall, I did at times find Bee Simulator to be somewhat enjoyable. However, the main grievance that I had with the game was definitely the controls. If the controls were improved, I would have a better experience but because they were so horrible, it actually ruined my experience. But if I were younger player, perhaps this issue would be less noticeable and would be absolutely fascinated with the world of the honeybee.