Review | BeeFense BeeMastered

LifeisXbox’s BeeFense BeeMastered review | Today, we’re taking a look at a remastered version of a successful mobile game. BeeFense BeeMastered is all about… bees, you guessed it! It’s a tower defense game where you have to protect your beehive fortress against the hornet menace. I’m usually quite skeptical when it comes to mobile games being released on PC and consoles, so let’s see if BeeFense BeeMastered by ByteRockers’ Games manages to be(e) different and knock my socks off!

ℹ️ | We played BeeFense BeeMastered for 5 hours on PC. This game is also available on Xbox – Nintendo Switch – PlayStation.

What we liked!

• Overal gameplay | The gameplay is quite interesting in BeeFense BeeMastered. Besides the typical tower defense mechanisms, you’ll also be managing your resources and allocating bees all the time. The basics still apply: armies of zombees (yes, there are zombie bees), flees, and hornets will come for your honey and try to steal it. If you run out of honey pots, you’re done. You’ll need to install various weapons like cherry guns and bumblebee bombers that can defend your bees and the precious honey. These weapons will need bees to operate them, so make sure you have enough bees! The enemies come in waves and you can always see when the enemies are going to attack, where they will come from, and how many will march down. Besides this, your bees will be busy with other tasks as well. They have to gather pollen so you can build new defenses/weapons and raise new bees, but you’ll also need nectar to feed your bees or they will go hungry and stop working. These are mandatory, but there are also optional things to do for your bees. Even though they are not required, they do come in quite handy and I’m sure you’ll find yourself allocating bees to these resources. I’m talking about collecting water and honey dew. The former can be used to give your towers a temporary boost, while the latter allows you to research your towers and unlock more technology or tower upgrades (I will expand on this below).
• Graphics & music | The graphics got a very nice update after the basic looks from the mobile game. I am acutally impressed about the transition from mobile to PC and console ports, both concerning graphics and the overal gaming experience! Anyway, we get some vibrant looking environments and cute looking bees, so that’s cool. The music is very casual and happy when you’re preparing your defenses and stuff, but it gets a little more intense and tunes down a bit when an attack is happening, so this was all very well balanced. I also liked that attacks were iniated by the sound of someone blowing a horn, it was simply perfect!
• Upgrades | On the field, you can reinforce your tower defenses to make them stronger. You can use pollen to do this and it will enhance your defense in significant ways. Each tower you built can be upgraded three times and a little flag on top of the tower will indicate how many upgrades its gotten. Besides this, there is also a research lab where you can put the honey dew that you gathered to good use. There are tower upgrades and technology upgrades to be found here. Tower upgrades make your defense towers stronger and include reinforcements like giving your boom beetle a flame thrower or giving your cherry gun incendiary ammo. Technology upgrades also come in quite handy and can be upgraded multiple times. For example, you can get a bigger nectar tank by increasing its capacity by 25, 50 and then 100%. The research lab gives you new options along the way, and even though they are pretty standard for tower defense games, I did enjoy them.
• Extra challenges | Every level has three additional challenges, besides trying to survive the intruders and keeping your honey. These extra objectives get you more honey dew, which always comes in handy. One challenge is always related to time. Finish the level within a certain time frame, and you complete said objective. The other two can be a variety of things, like using the water booster 3 times, or keeping a certain amount of honey jars. These do provide some sort of replay value, so that’s always nice.

Somewhere between

• Difficulty | BeeFense BeeMastered starts out fairly simple, but don’t let the easy start fool you! The game offers 26 levels, and personally, I started to sense a bigger difficulty around level 9 or 10. Before these, I could get through levels in one try, but around the 9th level, I had to give the levels multiple tries in order to get past them. Now, because this game has an increasing difficulty, I think some might not enjoy the more challenging levels so I’m putting this in the ‘somewhere between’ section. The second half of the game, and mostly the last couple of levels, provide a real challenge so be prepared!

What we disliked

• Missing in-game time indication | I think it is very strange that this title has no in-game time indication. Why, you might ask? Well, every level has three objects, and one of them is always completing said level in a specific amount of time. So, imagine this: you got two out of three objectives, and you want to go for the time-related one. But how are you supposed to know if you’ve passed that time when the game doesn’t show you how long you’ve been in this level. You only know when you’ve finished the level and this just seems weird to me. I really do hope they add a timer, a clock, or something to indicate the time!
• Bugs | Besides actual bugs crawling around in this game, there are also bugs as in glitches in BeeFense BeeMastered. In level 7 you get to use dung beetle balls. Actually, in order to finish that level for the first time, you have to use one against your enemies. However, I started playing this game with my computer mouse (rather than a controller), and no matter how many times or what way I clicked that damn ball, it did not move for some reason. I’m guessing this is a bug in the game because I tried restarting it with a controller, and to my surprise, it did work with the controller. This was quite annoying really, because I prefered playing BeeFense BeeMastered with my computer mouse. It also happened, while using the mouse, that I clicked to move to the next part of the dialogue, and it just appeared for half a second, and went to the other bee or whatever in the conversation. This was REALLY annoying as I felt I might have missed some important information. I thus recommend using a controller if you’re playing this game on the computer, because the mouse option is definitely not what it should be.

How long to beat the story | About 5 hours
How long to achieve 1000G | About 5 to 6 hours
Similar with | Plants vs Zombies but more elaborate

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