Bee War is a 2D Action Platformer that takes place long after the original insect war and sees our people enslaved by the victors. We play as a nameless Queen Bee on a quest to see her hive free, even at the cost of standing alone against the enemy army. Our mission is the pummel anything that crosses our path. To do this, we have three forms of attacks. A punch, a kick, and finally a sting projectile. The latter is the only attack you will use, the prior are completely useless. Not only do they take longer to use, but they also do less damage than your stinger.
One of the first things you’ll notice is that this is a really clunky game to control. Movement is stiff and attack animations take far too long to wind up. Worse still is that there isn’t a knock-back effect when damaging enemies. They will charge towards you until either you or they are dead. It is impossible to position yourself in a way you won’t take damage or kite enemies while attacking. That further makes your melee attacks useless. The best chance you have is to repeatably fire your stinger and hope your foe dies before reaching you. With how close they usually spawn to you, and this attack also being extremely sluggish, it is unreliable at best. Combat, in general, is completely busted in this title. You can’t avoid or fight off foes, so you will always be taking unnecessary damage.
After you take enough hits, your clothes will rip apart. If that happens, any enemies that touch you will sexually violate your character. Once you manage to get yourself free it will destroy the enemy as well. This can be pretty handy in the early stages since you can defeat a foe by only wasting one heart, which represents your overall health. It will become your worst nightmare later on, however. The game will start to rapidly spawn in an infinite amount of foes. They will then wait in line for their turn to abuse you, causing an unavoidable downward spiral. You do not get any invincibility frames, you just have to hope you have enough hearts to survive all of the enemies on screen and hope more don’t reach your location before you can escape.
In many situations, it is impossible to avoid everything going to heck. Either the enemy is spawned too close or there are too many at once. Your stinger is slow and the lack of a knock-back effect ensures you will be rushed. Jumping over or trying to avoid enemies is also impossible. This game would be entirely unplayable if not for the fact that upon death, it starts you back on the same screen you failed on with full health. By the end levels, I wasn’t even using the attack key anymore. I was just trying to desperately make it to the exit before even more foes spawned in. They are spawned in a way that they will overwhelm you regardless, so may as well take the hits and carry onward before it’s too late. On the next screen, you will be battered. Just get yourself killed before even attempting it and start it again with full health.
This may seem like an incredibly cheap and counter-intuitive way to play, but it is the only way. It doesn’t have balance nor are the gameplay mechanics well thought out. Bee Wars felt like it was made by someone who had no idea as to how video game design works or the things that make them tick. Simply starting you on the same screen with full health is a band-aid solution that makes it technically playable, yet brute-forcing your way through it is hardly fun. The tools you are given are not enough to get you by, you are forced to completely negate the gameplay. An example of bad design are the flying enemies. They fly in a way that you usually can’t attack them and pound you from directly above where none of your move-set can reach. You can’t try to move away as they are faster than you, and even if you could, the lack of knock-back and your slow attack animation still do you no favors. Just lay back and prepare your bee anus for the inevitable instead.
An aspect of this title I liked is that you need a key to exit the stage, like many DOS platformers of old. They are usually found throughout that stage, yet sometimes do require some light platforming to collect. As you may imagine, the controls for doing so are far from great, but at least they function, unlike the combat. It could do with a much longer hover from using your wings, though. You can only stay in the air for half a second before you plummet back down to earth. Your wings are nearly useless thanks to that. Navigation will rely mostly on holding shift to sprint and then the spacebar to jump. It is a minor part of the experience, sadly.
This brings us to the hentai. It is pretty solid. Each enemy has their own unique animation for when they have sex with you, and there are occasionally insects getting it on with different bees you have to save. When you lose all of your health, you will be treated to a random CG that may not even include the insect that did you in. They are also decent and most are animated as well. Even from the moment you start the game, you’ll be able to access the Gallery Mode to view all of the animations and CGs to your heart’s content. It is all pretty vanilla stuff. Disregarding the whole insect theme, everything is tame. You will not find any egg-laying or anything that isn’t vaginal sex.
Overall, the entire experience lasted me around half an hour. There was no ending to speak of, it just abruptly stops and goes straight to the credits. It really could have used a CG or at the very least some filler text on a black background. Generally speaking though, that is the least of its problems. Bee War costs 13 US dollars, it does not get the ‘at least its cheap’ sympathy. The hentai is alright, yet everything surrounding it is atrocious. In the state that it is in, I wouldn’t recommend you try it even if it was free. The combat does not fit the game it is in and instead of trying to balance that, it just starts you on the same screen with full health in order to let you brute force it. That negates the entire gameplay and turns it into a boring slog where you hold the right arrow key until you are victorious. No amount of skill will get you through this game, it is just not designed well enough as to be able to properly play it. Stay far, far away from this title.
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