Game Reviews

 Naughty Bear: Panic in Paradise is pretty much identical in concept to the original. This time around, the ever-cuddly bears have booked themselves into an island resort for a tropical vacation, and once again decided not to invite the titular Naughty. As ever, Naughty is unhappy with this arrangement, and decides to punish his peers in a variety of violent and murderous ways. 

The original game's conceit was amusing on paper, but the charm soon wore off. With a sequel that does nothing to expand the core premise, Naughty Bear doesn't even have the initial humor to work with. Paradise jumps right back into familiar territory, as Naughty murders bears in the same fashion he did last time. He sneaks up on victims and uses environmental objects (many of which are just cloned from the original) to skewer, burn, or otherwise mutilate them. Weapons can be used to beat or execute enemies, and traps can be used to injure, distract, and terrify. Committing atrocities in front of crowds can eventually drive victims insane, make them attack each other, or inspire suicide. 

All of this is pretty much copied and pasted from the first title, though some effort's been made into adding a lot more content. Naughty Bear can now disguise himself, Hitman-style, by dragging bears into the woods and stealing their clothes. There are also quite a few weapons that can be used against the do-gooders, which would have been excellent save for the fact that most them behave identically to one other, and use the same execution animations. There are more bears to slaughter, bigger maps, and a fresh leveling system in which individual bits of armor and weaponry gain experience in a fashion similar to Infinity Blade. Naughty can now wear costume pieces for his face, head, torso, arms, and legs, all giving a boost to his stats.

These additions, however, are merely surface-level enhancements implemented to create the illusion of something bigger and better, and do nothing to fix the game's core problems. It takes only a few minutes to work out that, no matter what weapon you use and however the environment's exploited, you're still essentially repeating one vaguely funny joke, told badly. What's worse, it's a joke the original game alreadydrove into the ground. You can only burn a bear's face on a barbecue a certain amount of times before it stops having any sort of emotional impact, and all that "impact" was spent by Behavior Interactive two years ago. 

There are over thirty stages, each featuring a key bear that must be "punished" a certain way. Some need to be killed with specific weapons. Others must be defeated while Naughty's wearing a certain costume. Others require more complex feats, such as getting other bears to attack it. The unpredictable, barely-functioning NPC A.I. can make more involved punishments a nightmare, and it's fairly common to spend a long time setting things up in a level, only for the target to die the wrong way and render all your hard work wasted. 

As more targets are unlocked, Panic in Paradise also starts exploiting itself to drag out the running time, forcing you to replay other stages to obtain specific costume parts, or giving you such vaguely defined instructions that you'll spend ages working out the requirements through trial-and-error. If you're the kind of gamer who judges a title almost exclusively by how long it is, you'll be pleased to know that there's enough content to keep you occupied for quite a while, more so than many PSN/XBLA releases.

I'd had too many instances of bears either getting themselves killed in the wrong way -- or the incorrect execution occurring due to my not being stood in the exact desired place -- to want to slaughter all of the 30+ targets, however. After hours of just doing the same painfully boring crap over and over, it's just too much.