What Makes Naughty Bear so Naughty?

If there is one game coming out this month that isn’t getting enough media attention, its Naughty Bear. Yes, it may have a title that sounds more like a dirty movie than a video game, but it also has the potential to be a cult classic.

The story of the game is that there is a giant Teddy Bear birthday party…but Naughty Bear wasn’t invited. Naughty Bear decides the right thing to do is to bring Daddles a present anyways, but on his way to deliver it he gets laughed at by the other bears. Naughty then realizes what he should do in light of this.

Go on a Homicidal Rampage, terrorize the other bears, and brutally murder them.

Teach Those Bears a Lesson

The game itself plays like a cross between an adventure and stealth game. The main objective is to complete level objectives, get revenge on the other bears, and collect Naughty Points. Your Naughty Points are what is used to score your efforts, and can be achieved in many different ways.

You get Naughty Points by scaring, and killing the other bears, but outright murder isn’t the best option if you are going for lots of points. The key to the game is the ability to scare the stuffing out of one of the bears, and let him live to tell the others his tale. The more scared you can get the bears, the higher your multiplayer will get, and the more creative you are with how you deal with them, the more points you can get. But you have to be careful, if you let a scared bear go, he could call the cops-or the army. You have to find the balance of where you can still keep Naughty safe while scaring.

You have many different weapons, traps, and environmental hazards you can use to your advantage against the other bears to help you score points. There are conventional weapons like machetes, cricket bats, guns and hammers, but you can also use things like fridges, cake mixers, electrical boxes and BBQ’s. There are also unlockable costumes and hats that will make the bears in the world act differently towards you. Naughty Bear claims to have incredible replay value because of how many different ways you can go through each level.

Naughty Bear has Weapons Galore

The lasting appeal here isn’t just the core game mechanic, its the presentation. Sure there are plenty of games out like Gears of War that are full of gore, but Naughty Bear takes the comical approach. Instead of buckets of blood being sprayed around, the bears explode into clouds of stuffing. Instead of manly grunts and screams, its high pitched wails and shrieks. It’s the overall feel of taking something innocent and twisting it into a horror movie, and it’s hilarious.

But wait there is more! Naughty Bear actually has a multiplayer mode. So after you are done murdering helpless AI Teddy’s, you can hop online and compete against other real people. The modes announced so far are an Oddball like Cake Walk mode, where one bear has to hold onto a cake for as long as possible while avoiding enemy bears. A Scavenge like Jelly mode, where 3 bears have to run into the woods and collect plates of Jelly while a player controlling Naughty Bear lurks in the shadows. There is also Assault, a 2v2 game type where one team is defending a gold statue while the other is trying to destroy it, and Golden Uzi, a game type like Juggernaut where one bear has a golden uzi and the others try to kill him and take that Uzi.

Naughty Bear is the type of game you don’t want to miss. It is going to go under a lot of gamers radars, but the ones who do find it are going to have a rare gem. Naughty Bear comes to the Xbox360 and Playstation 3 June 29^th.

And for horror fans, don’t miss Amazon and Gamestop’s pre-order bonuses, a Freddy Krueger Costume from Amazon and a Jason Vorhees Costume from Gamestop.