Naughty Bear is one of those videogames that, let’s face it, will sell based on the name alone. It’s a silly title that immediately grabs your attention and, once you’ve had a look over the packaging with its absurd depictions of a violent, murderous teddy bear, it could be hard to resist taking the game home. Don’t be fooled, however. Naughty Bear is a shallow and unsatisfying, budget-quality game that doesn’t even deliver the humour that the packaging and title promise.

Hur hur

If you’re expecting an epic, story-driven action-adventure game then prepare to encounter the first of many disappointments. Naughty Bear’s content and structure is a little on the slim side, with just seven stages that each take about five to ten minutes to complete. The idea isn’t to move through a story, but rather to place the player in a series of enclosed challenges that test their abilities in the aim of achieving as high a score as possible. Think something similar to The Club or the Mercenaries mode from Resident Evil 5. Except, of course, that those games were really quite good.

Racking up a huge score in Naughty Bear requires that you raise your multiplier by smashing objects, screaming your head off and generally acting like a lunatic to keep the other bears around you scared. Once the multiplier is sufficiently high you can then start raking in the points by murdering them in as many different ways as possible, whether it be with a handful of simple weapons or by sabotaging household items so that you can sneak up and kill those who try to repair them.

This might all sound like good fun, and it is for the first few minutes or so, but it soon becomes quite tiresome. What little comedy there is to be found in the different variations of kill will be exhausted in little more than a single stage. And then you’re just left to concentrate on dominating those leaderboards with your best score.

Funny?

The problem here is that Naughty Bear does nothing to make the score attack process that much fun. There’s none of the moment-to-moment split-second decision-making and that makes the best score-attack games so intense to play, and there are so few variables to the strategy that you won’t have to think very hard to reach your goals.