Review by: Danielle Riendeau

Remember Conker’s Bad Fur Day? It was an N64 platformer premised on Disney-reject, Banjo-Kazooie-ish Rare characters behaving badly (getting drunk, kicking the crap out of one another, etc.), and at the time, it was funny (and very fun). 505 has decided to take that spirit (cute, demented, crayola-hued violence), adding an extra dash of over-the-top, Manhunt-style carnage. Mix that in with a bit of Dead Rising combat (with pick-up-and-play weapons strewn about) and you pretty much have Naughty Bear, a melee combat game starring a bunch of violent, rainbow-colored teddy bears.

You play as Naughty, a teddy with a bitten-off chunk of fluff where his right ear should be and a chip on his shoulder from the rejection he’s experienced from the community of other bears. After being laughed away from a birthday party, Naughty snaps and decides to wreak violent war on his oppressors.

Naughty can attack with his fists (or, stubs?) or with any of the weapons that are lying about – guns, bear traps, baseball bats, etc. Or, he can scare other bears by “booing” at them and performing “scare” attacks. Scare your opponents enough and they will go insane. Drive any one bear’s insanity up high enough and he’ll kill himself, with a delightfully gory animation that spreads fluff (as opposed to blood) all over the stage.

Missions come in several different flavors – some have you kill all of your fellow bears, while others challenge you with driving each bear insane, or sneaking about in the shadows, unseen. Perhaps the most difficult are the “untouchable” stages, where you cannot get hit – and the “speed run” levels, which require serious hustle.

You unlock new stages as you go through the game, collecting naughty points for every mean/evil/not so nice thing that you do. Each stage builds upon the basic gametypes (kill em’ all, invisible, untouchable, insanity, etc.), but later levels throw more challenging enemies at you, like army bears, ninja bears, zombie bears – and, of course, robot bears. To give you a fighting edge, you earn abilities in the form of “hats” that give Naughty increased strength, speed, etc.

Sadly, not all is well on Perfection Island, for there is a crushingly repetitive game at the core of all this demented glee. See, there really aren’t a whole lot of weapons – and each one only has one animation. Worse, you are constantly playing in the same exact stages – and there isn’t a whole lot of terrain to cover for variety’s sake.