Ever wanted to have a bee or two? A whole swarm maybe? Well now you can! In this Roblox game, you "Hatch Bees! Collect Pollen!" and "Make Honey!" That is honestly the most simplified description of this game's gameplay. Despite the simple-sounding premise, there's a lot to this silly-looking game. But before I get to that, I'll tell you that this game is Very Popular. At the time of writing, there are 32 thousand active players, the game has almost 5,5 million favourites, over 2,2 billion visits, and over a million likes. That's REALLY impressive. It also won the Game of the Year Bloxy Award in 2019. This game even has MERCH, which includes cute plushies, figures, and even clothes. (I especially like the stylized beekeeper design.)

Now here's the thing: this was my first Roblox game that I've ever played. Which, at the time of writing was like a year ago. I wanted this to be first game that I write about for my site, because it just seems fitting. It just deserves this. But to do that, I had to get in there and refresh my memory on how it looked and played. And there went a few hours of my time.

In short, Bee Swarm Simulator is an interesting kind of incremental game (a LOT of Roblox simulators/"tycoons" are this), and what that means is that we have some statistics that we just want to make go up in one way of another. Number go up! What I mean by interesting is that, at the very beginning it starts out kind of innocent and simple, but with time it just keeps getting deeper and more complicated. Sure, you could say that that's about any incremental game out there, but I really think that this one gets a specific kind of insane. When I first played this game, I think it took me a couple weeks or so for my attention to shift to different Roblox experiences. And aside from playing it for a few more sessions here and there, it pretty much stayed at that. When I returned to it today, I have to admit that I was getting a bit lost in the sauce.

For starters, I looked like this:

Fantastic drip, I know. The big boots, especially.

Secondly, I looked at all the items I had in my hotbar and inventory. SO many differnt things with different effects and varying quantities. I had no idea what was for what and wether it was important or not. I even still had some cool eggs to hatch cool bees from! But no beehive slots to do so! So the first thing I did was trying to figure out how to get a fresh new slot, as I remember that that is something you can do. I ran around the map a bit, talked with the various cute NPC bears and got a little sidetracked with the very same event that I participated in the first time I played: Beesmas! But this time it had an addition of an AI-powered Robo-Bear, that can apparently give you endless generated quests. Does sound interesting, but this is not the time! I need a slot! In the end, I couldn't remember how to get one so I just went to the wiki and got reminded that you buy them at the mountaintop store. Ah yes, of course. I fortunately could affort one, and hatched a gifted Honey Bee! How sweet.

After that, I decided to turn my attention to the Beesmas stuff, which seemed to be about the same, save for the addition of Robo-bear and whatever is connected with it. Do Bee Bears quests, get presents that you give to the other bears, decorate the tree, get boosts, etc. So yeah, I got to one of the main things about this game: doing quests that the bears give you. But before I get to that, perhaps a word about the actual main gameplay loop. You go out to the various fields around the map, get pollen, go to your hive to convert that pollen to honey, and spend honey on upgrades to get more pollen, faster. You get more bees, you make your bees better, you get better equipment, you get things that give you buffs. Numbers go up! Now back to the quests: the things you need to do for those can range from something as simple as getting pollen of specific color (as there are different colors of flowers in the fields), through defeating certain enemies, to getting or using certain items, and more. For doing these quests you usually get some cool stuff I think, and even some permanent buffs. Maybe even special bees in some cases, what with events that keep happening, but I can't say much about that because I haven't been playing the game. In any case, I think you get the deal. By the way, it's kinda funny to me that the Christmas event lasts until March, but I have nothing against giving players a lot of time to complete the event, it's pretty great!

Anyway, if you didn't get lost yet in it all, then just wait, because I'm about to go into even more detail about the contents of this game. The main feeling I get while playing Bee Swarm Simulator is that you just can't run out of things to do or accomplish. You can have quests to do, eggs to hatch, bees to level up or to make gifted or to obtain, equipment or items to craft, enemies to kill, things to buy. Going into more detail, for example you might want to grind tickets to buy something from the ticket store, which theres many ways to get those. You might be going for a specific nectar that you get from these planters that you can put on the fields, and depending on the field you get different typees of nectar, which in turn give different buffs. There might be a sprout that appeared and you're in that field getting pollen so that it grows and you get a lot of stuff. You can do whatever it is that you have to do to join one of the two (or three??) bee factions and get their exclusive gear and perks and do their quests. Oh, now it's night and the fireflies are going to a field, and if you touch them all they give you moon tokens and stuff, and you can use the moon tokens to craft a moon trinket thing. You hear a weird squeaking from the top of the mountain because the Mondo Chick has spawned and if you take your time to kill that tanky fucker, you'll again get a LOT of stuff. There's the ant challenge where you get pollen in an arena while fighting off ants and avoiding huge lawn mowers to get the best score you can to get a cool ant trinket thing! Do special quest lines to get special bees! Just getting the pollen while having a lot of rare bees and running around like a crazy person to grab all these power tokens that they're dropping and having all these special effects happening, and you can use items all the while as well, spawning stuff like rain clouds, frogs, coconuts, what have you!!! I myself am nowhere near the real endgame of this, and when I see players doing all kinds of black magic in a nearby field, all I can do is stop to wonder: just how many hours did they put into this darn game!? Oh yeah, also, after you spawn in, look to the fields, and look up, you see a dancing stickbug:

Look at him go!

If your head is spinning from all this, don't worry. Its a lot to take in, and I still didn't touch upon everything this game has to offer. There really is A LOT and I really have to wonder what strats and metas to get the best pollen outputs possible people have came up with. There's some really dedicated players, and the wiki for Bee Swarm Sim might just be the most in-depth one out of all the Roblox game wikis. (But who knows, maybe I'm wrong!) But aside from all this, the game really does suck you in, I think in this specific way that incrementals usually do, and I do genuinely think that it's a pretty fun game to play. There's this different game on Roblox, called "Grass Cutting Incremental" that is a more traditional incremental, which didn't really grab me much. In comparison to it, Bee Swarm Sim is way more active and varied to me.

Okay, now I wanna talk about something OTHER than the gameplay. For graphics, they're a bit chaotic. The map is made out of big simple shapes, with more detailed decorations placed around. The enemies aren't exactly consistent with each other either, with the ladybugs and beetlees being round, while the mantis is blocky, almost like a Minecraft mob. The placement of fields, shops, and other important things can make you feel lost sometimes at first, but it's not difficult to get used to. The visual effects for various bee skills and items are also quite varied, but I think they're more consistent with one another. In general the whole look of the game isn't exactly cohesive or consistent, but somehow it's not exactly that detrimental to the game. Sure, it could look better, but it's honestly fine enough as is. (I have low standards, but that's beside the point.) The bees are cute, and some have silly and funny faces, which is great, and the bears are simple but look good.

The thing that really brings it all together for me, is the sound design. The music tracks that accompany the gameplay somehow really fit the overall aesthetic and mood of the game. I adore the style of music this game has, these specific synths that make up the tracks are really original, and they make the music be honestly unlike anything I've heard before. The sound effects are amazing too, they really enhance all the aformentioned visual effects, and I like that I don't have to look to know what's happening around me. The specific sound of a sprout growing, the sharp tone of a Vicious Bee attack, the funny chirping of the Mondo Chick. The sounds are so unreal and synthetic in a way that really helps the game have it's own identity that's hard to replicate. And we can't forget the iconic Stickbug Theme.

Better watch out. He's dangerous.