Battle Bears. The description says it’s a shooter that pits you against a horde of mercilessly affectionate bears (the Huggables) that want nothing more than to hug you…to death. It wasn’t the premise that got me to buy it, though. Bearlieve it or not, I gave the developers $0.99 simply because of the title and the cool icon.
Presentation
Battle Bears is an absurd game. You play as some sort of special forces bear with an assault rifle who rides unicorns and steals pots of gold. I haven’t even tried to make sense of the plot, but kudos to the devs for actually trying to include one in their bear blasting bonanza.
You start off behind enemy lines with only your gun and a make-shift Unicorn horn crossbow to defend yourself against the swarms of Huggables (think murderous Care Bears + Skittles). The enemies make a beeline to hug you, and their cutesy rainbow souls beam up Star Strek style when you kill them with a headshot. Regardless of how you kill them, they’ll spill strange bear blood (juice?) that can be any colour of the rainbow. It’s still a violent game, but this effect does take away some of the gore factor in much the same way the Samurai Jack cartoon used oil instead of blood in the robots.
Every weapon in the game has its own sound, and you’ll be rewarded between levels with cool slideshow cutscenes complete with voiceovers. I’ve gotta say, this game really has some slick presentation.
Bear blasting
The control scheme is similar to Metal Gear Solid Touch: you pan the screen using one finger, but you shoot by tapping with another one. You can switch weapons and reload using the icon in the top-left corner of the screen. Your only goal is to make sure that the incoming Huggables don’t take out your sandbag defense, or you’ll be hugged to death.
The bears come in three varieties: slow, fast, and huge honking blue (okay, so that’s my name for them). Killing them is easy enough — the small and fast bears will go down in two body shots or one glorious, rainbow-y headshot. The big bears take about five rifle rounds to take out, but they go down just like the rest of them.
You never know how many enemies you have to kill on a given level, but the screen fades when you win so that you can finally give your thumbs a break. The killing starts off pretty slowly, but really speeds up to a manic pace by stage four. Luckily for you, finishing a stage also means unlocking a new weapon or item to use on the battlefield.
The unlockables are probably the best part about the game. They all have something strange or cute (or both) about them. I won’t name them all, but it’s not everyday you see unicorn blood used as a repellant on sandbags or a Bearzooka that fires bear body parts.
Conclusion
The only bad thing I can say about the game is that the saving progression is a little unforgiving: once you’ve been bear hugged to death, it’s bear luck next time. The game isn’t particularly long (each wave takes around two minutes and two or three waves make up a level), but it’s a pain that you have to start over again if you should make a mistake.
That problem aside, Battle Bears is a very amusing title made with a lot of love and it makes a fine addition to any shooter fan’s growing iPhone game library.
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You can pick up Battle Bears for $0.99 on the App Store (link here). Or you can try the lite version here.
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TAGS: shooter
