Bee Hero: Bug Blaster makes its case for player consequences clear from the very opening start screen. Each bee you create to take into battle has four lives to complete the over 200 levels in the game. If you lose all four lives, that character’s save is erased from the game, never to be recovered ever again. With permadeath fully enforced, bright cartoon graphics drawing your attention, and fluid twin stick arena shooting making each gameplay moment engrossing and often stressful to play, you’ll be surprised to read that I’m going to spend most of my time talking about the game’s biggest boon – its skill tree.
Bee Hero follows in the footsteps of Action RPGs. There are multiple skill trees in the game, one per character class, with over 100 nodes in each. You’ll be presented with a choice to start off with one skill tree, and there will be simple nodes like adding health, damage, extra bullets, and fire rate and range increases. You’ll also spot various unique skills that can be unlocked as you progress along different rows. The crucial thing is that your skill trees are a starter pack that can be augmented by equipping different gems that you can either buy in the village between levels or collect from chests when clearing a level of enemies. Each gem has its own level and abilities, and they can overwrite skill trees when you equip them with their own unique properties. If you’ve already unlocked and equipped a node from your skill tree, that will stay, but you can swap out different abilities, upgrade certain node styles, and totally buff up, or ruin how you’ll upgrade your bee over time, depending on what gems you’ve got equipped at any one time.
With 12 skill trees, slowly unlocking across the game, when you level up by killing enemies, the choice of where to upgrade next gets increasingly more strategic and harder. You’ll be checking the store, and your found gems to see if something improves your prospects or not. If you’ve just killed a boss, you’ll get green diamonds to unlock the only metaprogression across the game – single upgrades that stay unlocked from run to run, although you can only equip one per boss kill, no matter how many you’ve unlocked over time. Put simply, I’ve never spent so much time fiddling around with a skill tree in an RPG, never mind a twin stick shooter. Creativity and trial and error are key, and the fact that you can go back to earlier levels (albeit procedurally generated around a seed of difficulty) to test out things in a safer setting is a great idea.
With 1,300 upgrades to customise, you’ll be in for the long haul with Bee Hero: Bug Blaster, so it is just as well the game plays excellently. Movement is fluid as you fly around arenas, avoiding various concoctions of enemies. As you progress through the game, you’ll get earlier enemies recoloured, but now with new attacks, faster movement, and more health to chip away on. There are status ailments, just like an action RPG, and elemental attacks, too. Whilst levels are procedurally generated, they hang around similar difficulty levels as variations of the same sets of enemies. Bosses are massive, tooled-up versions of standard enemies that can take you out in a few hits, and they provide a sensible challenge. They often spawn their normal versions in large numbers to keep you distracted, zoom off-screen, and then charge at you. Always stay moving.
I have very little criticism of Bee Hero: Bug Blast, but there were two minor points to note. Firstly, sometimes enemies spawned in the arena walls – particularly spiders or bugs that swung around on webs. You can’t always shoot them unless they swing into the level, and that’s a bit annoying. Secondly, there are levels where poison is spread across the floor, but the visual green swirl showing where the poison is doesn’t match up with you becoming damaged. I died multiple times for seemingly being poisoned when I hadn’t touched anything visually, and that left me annoyed and confused, given the permadeath situation. If poison is in a level, I stay so far away from it and pray it doesn’t spread my way! Once you’ve cleared the 200 levels, there are special trials to complete, which are even harder than the main game. Good luck. You’ll need it!
This is an underrated, hidden gem of a game. Full of character, customisation, and challenge, Bee Hero: Bug Blaster is a great game that I found just as fun in the skill tree and customisation menus as I did on the battlefield. It’s the little stats and tweaks that you can get lost in that make Bee Hero a joy to play. Sweet is the sting that brings to the gaming world. Don’t sleep on it.
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