Game Review: Bumblebee – Search for Happiness (Xbox Series X)

In the vein of the Aery games, Bumblebee – Search for Happiness is a 3D flight exploration game developed and published by EpiXR Games. Where the simple goal is to control a bee as it seeks a new home.

The music. That is what makes Bumblebee – Search for Happiness a worthwhile play. It is quite lovely and lives up to the promise of a ‘relaxing’ experience. Flying across fairly expansive and detail locations with an array of pretty tunes can be quite soothing. Alas, that’s about all that makes Bumblebee – Search for Happiness memorable.

There’s not a lot to this. Ten levels, where the goal is to fly through ‘knowledge shards’ (they looked like leaves to me) to unlock the next level. Each has thirty, and each take you all over the level, which should sound like an enjoyably simple gameplay experience, except it’s not and all because of the fact that the next ‘shard’ will not appear until you have collected the previous one. Which would be fine, if the next one that appeared was in front of you. However, Bumblebee – Search for Happiness loves to spawn them out of sight, resulting in you having to fly around, lost. Which in one level with trees, creates a ton of frustration.

Again, this wouldn’t be too much of a problem, except energy potions (that allow you to fly faster) are also dotted around the map, making it hard (from a distance) to differentiate between them or the ‘shard’. It’s hard to feel too relaxed, lovely music or not, when you can’t find a way to move the level forward.

Then we get into the flight physics, and while the bee controls fine, the camera doesn’t work well with sharp turning and the speed boost thing makes it downright uncontrollable. Think a dolly zoom effect, and you will have some idea of how jarring it is to try and move the bee around at speed.

All of this, added to an unsatisfying length (about an hour), results in a game that simply isn’t very good. Find the soundtrack if you can and enjoy separately.