Reviews

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

Right off the bat this game gets a 5 in technical for using 3D graphics. That's a very rare thing to see in hack games so I'm super stoked not only to see polygons, triangles, models at varying level of detail, but a level of touch with animations and flower bouncing motion to match.

I made it past level 10 and appreciated all the self aware humor in the special text scrollers. "final time, I promise" and "collect *ALL* the pollen, just kidding" both legitimately caught me off guard and had me laughing out loud.

Overall the game could use a bit more polish, (titles, options, direction hint arrows, hud, etc) so a tad off from full marks. I ended up preferring the keyboard controls over the mouse. Mouse movement point-to-point was too aliased and became a distraction.

I would also like to see a richer use of color theory and hues. A lot of the colors felt like out-of-the-box yellows, reds greens, and blues. I would love it if these palettes had a more styled approach that would give the game a more unique look and feel, along with better color contrasts to make the elements easier to distinguish (making the queen being more visually distinct from the environmental elements and other bees, light text on darker background, etc).

At first I didn't like the small hit box on the pollen, but as I progressed in the levels I actually preferred it when I needed to pick pollen from only certain color flowers.

Other little touches I really enjoyed were the little crown on the queen, and the flapping animations on the bee wings.

Overall, this was definitely one of the more technically comprehensive entries, and you can really tell it takes a lot of experience to pull something like this off that is so technically extensive in such a short amount of time. Control, camera constraints, world, graphics performance, all really impressive and admirable for any TINS entry.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by dthompson all reviews by dthompson

This is pretty damn good for a 72h hack. Nice block colour visuals, intuitive controls, and of course an entirely procedurally generated 3D environment. There's even a themed text scroller! Very nice.

At first I'd worried that the Queen's AI would be difficult to follow, but actually her behaviour isn't jarring at all - and given her speed matches yours, following her actually makes for a fair challenge.

Overall, it's very easy to see what you're doing - though the bee's butt did occasionally get in the way. Would be easily fixable with a tiny amount of zoom out, but this really wasn't a huge problem.

Given the brilliant graphics on this thing, it's with some solid regret that I felt I had to mark this down in terms of the artistic requirements; I get elias's thinking on it making fun of 'old-fashioned things', but I'm not feeling that making fun of fetch quests et al quite hits the mark. They aren't *too* old, IMHO! So yeah, apologies if this seems harsh, but that's why.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 3 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

Who never wanted to be a bee? Now you can!

Beautiful and fun game.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 5