A Bee-Guiling Merge Game That has Too Many Flaws to Stand Out
A quick show of hands: with a game called To Bee Jazz, would you expect the soundtrack to contain some jazz? You would, wouldn’t you. Well, let me reveal that there is no jazz to be heard at all. The bees in To Be Jazz are all playing brass instruments, keyboards and double-basses – all mainstays of the jazz genre – yet none of those instruments feature in the soundtrack. Instead, the in-game music is played on what sounds like a flamenco guitar. Mind blown.
I’m glad to get that off my chest and move onto the game proper. To Be Jazz might sound like it’s a rhythm action game but it is, instead, a merge game. You are given a shaped arena that fills the game screen, and you can glide around the circumference. In the centre of the arena is a centre of gravity, and you can fire bees of various sizes at this centre of gravity, where they nestle and wait to be merged.
Honey I Merged the Bees
These full-360 arenas are not new to merge games, but they’re reasonably unusual regardless. I really like them: they give you more space to work with, which only amplifies the strategy, and it allows you to pull off some flamboyant trickshots. You can fire a bee in such a way that they dislodge other bees and slingshot round to the other side of the arena. There’s so much more opportunity to create chain-reactions and send bees careening around the field of play.
As with most merge games, you’re looking to bring identical bees together so that they can merge. Those merged bees become bigger, and can, in turn, merge with other bees that are that size. It’s a simple format that’s been popularised over the past five years, and it works well here. There’s a real joy that comes from seeing a combo of bees burst to become a much bigger bee. To Be Jazz leans into this nicely by making the bee-balls oddly powerful. If you hit a bee with another bee, they bounce everywhere.
To Bee Jazz could have done with a clarity pass, though. The bees don’t look distinct enough. In a fit of neglect, the first two bees are both blue and small, while two mid-range bees are both red and medium-sized. I was constantly getting them mixed up, cursing the artists.
To Bee or Not to Bee, That is The Question
To Bee Jazz follows in the footsteps of other Afil Games merge games (see Zoo Orbs) by following a mission structure. In the top-left of the screen is a small shopping list of bees for you to make. There’s often more than one type and in multiple quantities, and you can’t just satisfy them independently. They all need to be present in the arena at once, which creates some challenges. How do you keep three bees of the same kind in the arena if they’re only going to cuddle up to each other and merge?
These missions bring a welcome bit of strategy to the merging. You’re not just mindlessly matching: you have to occasionally protect the bees (i.e. not match them) so you can move forward with the mission. If I could change anything, however, it’s that the missions wait a short period of time before they complete, which is something of a pain. Two bees can merge in that time, and you’re left cursing the little pause that scuppered you.
There are a few missions in a sequence before you complete a level and move onto the next. To Bee Jazz has some ideas for how levels can be different from each other – the shape of the arena for one, and the missions it asks you to complete – but it’s fighting a bit of a losing battle. The arenas don’t change all that much about the experience, and there are only so many ways that you can dress up the missions to make them different. So, while it’s nice to feel a sense of progression as you travel through the levels, there is also a growing sense of fatigue. You might find yourself detaching from To Bee Jazz before the end.
To Infinity and Bee-yond
The levels aren’t the only way to play, however. There is also an Infinite Mode, which takes away the notion of levels and just sticks with an endless list of missions. Depending on your mood, it might be the preferred way to play: with the levels, you get a better sense of progression, but you also get reset every five minutes or so. With Infinite Mode, you can keep growing those bees all the way to the ultimate Clarinet Bee.
Curiously, you can tinker with power-ups in Infinite Mode when you can’t in the levels. There’s no need for reserving the power-ups for a single mode: including them in the levels would have done wonders for the sense of fatigue. But hey, it’s nice they’re there. They refresh on a cooldown, and they let you destroy a blocker or jumble them. Most of the time, you’re looking to keep bees rather than get rid of them, and it’s easy to remix them with a well-placed Flute Bee, but it’s good to have the choice.
As a budget package, you get a decent amount of stuff in To Bee Jazz. Afil Games took a wrong turn with the simplistic and thin Zoo Orbs Safari, so it’s positive to see them walk that back. There are 25 levels to complete, and they have a succession of missions, rather than the one or two in Zoo Orbs Safari. There’s 2000G for you to merge towards, and the addition of an Infinite Mode at least gives you an alternative to how you shove your bees together.
Come for the Merging, Not the Jazz
I can’t make up my mind about To Bee Jazz. The core is solid: it’s a rewarding merge game, mainly because of the gravity-defying arenas. The bees slingshot and pinball each other, creating merges when you don’t even mean it.
But that core gets nibbled away by some confused colours on the bees, a same-iness between levels, and a complete and utter lack of any flipping jazz. Which, I’m sure you agree, is unforgivable (and if you disagree, chuck an extra half mark on).
Important Links
Embrace The Musical Buzz In To Bee Jazz On Xbox – https://www.thexboxhub.com/embrace-the-musical-buzz-in-to-bee-jazz-on-xbox/
Buy from the Xbox Store, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/to-bee-jazz-xbox-series/9N20173WGB33/0010
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/to-bee-jazz-xbox-one/9PC1DCB429GR/0010
There’s a Windows PC drop too – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/to-bee-jazz-windows/9P3GLXJDZT49/0010
