Game: CyberHive
Genre: Adventure, Role-Playing, Simulation, Strategy
System: Nintendo Switch (also on Steam & Android)
Developers | Publishers: Redblack Spade
Age Rating: US Teen | EU 3+
Price: US $9.99 | UK £7.39 | EU € 8,19
Release Date: May 6th, 2021
Review code used, with many thanks to Redblack Spade
CyberHive is a strategic space travel simulator game from Redblack Spade, originally released on Steam in November last year.
All aboard the Melistar
You take command of a spaceship called Melistar a bee-shaped starship in a galaxy inhabited by humanoid insects. Alone with its crew of scantly clad female humanoids who are actually bees and the Queen bee. Yeah, you read that right bees of the buzzing kind.
You are tasked with travelling through space, the game mainly revolves around keeping the bees alive, collecting resources and defending your ship in a Missile command style mini-game.
Bee Humanoid
There are 7 rooms on the space ship that need a bee crew attached to them. So as you begin the game you have to assign a bee humanoid to each room to work during each cycle of the game. The view you have of your ship is zoomed out, you can’t zoom in any closer than the picture above shows. It is basically a static view you have as it never changes.
You have five bees as you start the game, but the Queen is continually producing more bees. You assign bees to the Barracks, Power Compartment, Laboratory, Control Cabin, Honeycomb, and Medical Compartment. You’ll always want at least one bee in the first two, as they are responsible for finding basic resources and producing Energy Gel.
Energy Gel
You have four primary resources to keep an eye on, they are Parts, Crystals, Biomaterial and Energy Gel. Energy Gel is the most important resource as it feeds the Queen bee and the worker bees. If you run out of it, it’s game over and you start again. The biomaterial is used for producing more bees for the spaceship, keeping an eye on that is important too. Crystals are the raw material that gets processed into Energy Gel, while you use Parts to upgrade and repair Melistar’s onboard facilities.
You send your bees out to explore asteroids and planets for resources and artefacts from a lost civilisation. Meet strange bug races and you have choices to make that will affect the gameplay. Combat takes place in the form of a mini-game similar to Missile command as you shoot missiles aimed at your spaceship. It is fine but it is not an engaging style of combat for the player to take part in.
A few Niggles
CyberHive has a campaign mode along with a survival mode. Though to me both felt pretty much the same experience while playing it. The goal is to survive for 130 turns and you can’t save the game during survival mode. There’s no story either, but there are more frequent random events and extra combat encounters.
Overall CyberHive might be an interesting game, unfortunately, but I couldn’t play much of it. Every time I played CyberHive the game froze. The buttons would not work and I had no option but to turn the game off. This meant that I have replayed chapter one of the campaign mode more time’s than I care to mention. In fact, I could not progress with the game at all as it kept freezing in chapter one.
Visuals and Controls
Everything in CyberHive is presented to the player via static info pictures popping up on the screen. There is very little animation in the game other than during the combat. Your ship does move across the screen but that happens so slowly you can barely see it moving.
As for the scantily clad female bees, personally, I really don’t see the point of the lack of clothing that is worn in space. Again it is another example of using scantly clad females to titillate male gamers when it doesn’t have anything to do with the storyline. Would you really be wearing that type of clothing while in space? I doubt it!
When CyberHive actually runs for long enough to let me play it, the game controls fine. After all, it’s basically a point and click game as that’s all you do throughout the gameplay, there isn’t much that can go wrong when you’re pointing and clicking.
Conclusion
I’d like to tell you that CyberHive is a wonderful strategy game. But I can’t say that it is, neither can I say it’s a really terrible game.
What I can say is I would steer clear of CyberHive until the game receives an update as in my opinion, you won’t be getting a playable game. Yes, the game does play but only up until the point where it freezes. And like me, you will spend your playtime replaying chapter one over and over again. So I’m left with no choice but to score CyberHive as,
Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure 
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