izigame.me

Bears in space is some combination of Doom, Ratchet & Clank, Borderlands, and the more recent High on Life but doesn’t do any of its influences all that well.

Gameplay is very doom/bullet hell inspired and while fun at the start, quickly becomes repetitive and more of a nuisance than anything. Guns and their upgrades are directly influenced by R&C but ultimately feel barebones at best in comparison. It takes forever to get the gun upgrades and with dozens of them it would be a massive time sink to try. Enemies are really generic and most just have a variation on laser ball attack pattern. It’s not the worst gunplay I’ve ever felt but it certainly won’t be bringing you back. Also, I hope you like destroying purple boxes because that is one of the pillars of this game (yet even in this area it feel less satisfying than R&C).

Story/characters are…rough. The ultimate main story is a bit of a meme the whole way through and feels extremely disjointed at times. It also drags on for way too long for what it is trying to tell and ends up feeling like a chore that never ends. One level after another that feel repetitive and derivative. The characters while there are a few bright moments, are mostly annoying to listen to and frankly uninteresting. It’s just joke after joke after joke and it devalues them the more the game goes on. This is compounded by the terrible voice acting of the main characters’ partner and various other NPCs you meet along the way. They don’t do a good job of selling the stereotypes they are trying to poke fun at and have a pretty underwhelming delivery. I know this was made by a small team but it doesn’t change the fact that it is still bad.

The world levels themselves are varied at least but are again too large, empty, and bland. It feels like you are going through a game still in alpha and most of the visual clutter has yet to be added. Lighting feels really washed out too with a weird low contrast haze look. It’s not fun to look around most of the time and if you don’t care about the little secrets scattered around, would probably prefer to just run through most of it. Those secrets can be fun but most of them are just on the nose 2 second jokes that honestly feel pretty lazy.

As for performance it ran fine for me on a 7800x3d and 2080ti but was surprisingly maxing my gpu, odd for a game of this low visual fidelity. There are some major performance dips when a bunch of small enemies are killed in succession.

Overall I would most likely give this game a mixed rating if there was one because I can see some people enjoying enough about it but I’m going to err on the side of don’t recommend. It just doesn’t do all that much well and feels like a watered down soup of multiple other games. Maybe pick this up on a deep sale and give it a try.