BeeFense BeeMastered

Genre: Tower Defense

Players: 1

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Review:

BeeFense is a Tower Defense game that seems to have released on Android in 2016 (though it’s no longer available on that platform) before being ported to PC in 2017, and then re-released in 2021 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch with “BeeMastered” release that improved the presentation and added new content to the campaign. As you might guess from the name, this game’s spin on the Tower Defense genre has you controlling a hive of bees, assigning the workers to collect resources or man turrets to defend against invading hornets and other bugs.

The gameplay mechanics here have some interesting ideas about how to use the “bee” theme to set this game apart from others in the genre, with players able to spread pollen as they collect it to grow new flowers, increasing the resources they can gather. What’s more, in some levels growing pollution gradually decreases the area flowers can grow, giving players reason not to dawdle. It’s a clever mechanic that helps to mix things up here.

The presentation here is quite good too, with simple but nice-looking 3D characters and environments with lots of color and some decent animation. This is backed by a lighthearted soundtrack and lots of buzzing noises that aren’t especially noteworthy, but fit the theme well enough.

While the review thus far has been generally positive, unfortunately I encountered some pretty major flaws here that really dragged down the game. Namely, the loading times in this game are absolutely outrageous on Nintendo Switch. When I load up the game, I literally have to wait for about four minutes for the game to even load into the main menu, and then when I load up an actual level I have to wait a few minutes more. It is crazy that a game that doesn’t looks all that impressive forces players to wait this long, and a less patient player could easily find themselves wondering if the game is just freezing up every time they fire it up.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the game isn’t very good at indicating to players what they’re meant to do in some levels, despite how much they force players to sit through their characters’ text conversations. In one level I simply could not figure out how I was supposed to gather more resources, resulting in me apparently being forced to fail.

If it wasn’t for these massive problems, I feel like BeeFense BeeMastered would be a pretty good Tower Defense game. However, as it is, the game is nearly unplayable, with atrocious loading times, terrible pacing, and doing a poor job indicating what players are expected to do. There are countless other Tower Defense options on Nintendo Switch, I recommend you check one of those out instead.

tl;dr – BeeFense is a Tower Defense game where players control bees collecting pollen and fending off invading insects, and while there are some clever gameplay mechanics and a decent presentation, none of that matters when the loading times are so ridiculously bad, the game’s pacing is terrible, and the game does a poor job outlining its directions to the player. The result is an excruciating entry in the genre that is absolutely not worth your time.

Grade: D-

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