Bears In Space

I have a soft spot for small teams that swing absurdly big, and Broadside Games - three people, Queensland, Australia - spent roughly seven years building something that feels like it escaped from a fever dream at a Saturday morning cartoon studio. Bears in Space is a boomer-shooter-meets-bullet-hell FPS where astronaut Maxwell Atoms accidentally fuses his DNA with a fugitive bear named Beartana, and the two of them spend the next ten-to-fifteen hours blasting oil-thirsty robots across factories, medieval dungeons, space carnivals, and ancient temples. The premise sounds like a joke. It mostly is. That is the whole point. The shooting sits at the centre of everything, and it holds up. Movement is fast, vertical, and expressive - double-jump, dash, and a wall-jump weave together until dodging intricate projectile waves starts to feel almost musical. The arsenal runs to over 25 weapons, and they are genuinely strange: an exploding square basketball, a duck gun that weaponises breadcrumbs, a mini anvil slingshot. Most weapons level up organically through use, gaining XP with every kill until they evolve into a new tier, which is a quiet, satisfying loop running underneath all the chaos. Honey pots scattered through levels let you trigger bear form, briefly swapping guns for paw-based destruction - the catch is that Beartana mode is gated, so it stays a reward rather than a crutch. Platforming sections are present and undemanding by default, though a Platform Helper mode can soften every jump for players who just want the comedy and the combat without the traversal friction. Difficulty sliders cover damage in both directions and aim assist, which makes the whole thing genuinely accessible without watering down the ceiling for veterans. Level design is where the craft really shows. Each stage reads like a different biome with its own visual logic - the kind of variety that a three-person team absolutely should not have been able to pull off. Mini-games show up mid-campaign: a Time Crisis-style on-rails shooter, shooting galleries, fishing, basketball. They are short enough that they land as jokes rather than obligations. Reviewers have noted a Ratchet and Clank influence in the art direction and a Serious Sam / TimeSplitters lineage in the movement feel, and both comparisons ring true. Boss fights arrive with a soundtrack that leans into the tension rather than playing the absurdity for laughs, which is the right call. The honest caveat is length. At fifteen-plus hours the game can wear its jokes thin. The comedy is family-friendly and old-fashioned in a Leslie Nielsen or early-noughties Adult Swim sense rather than anything mean-spirited, which is genuinely refreshing, but some gag sequences repeat and the relentless pace of both bullets and punchlines can induce a kind of pleasant fatigue. A handful of players drop off around the halfway point, and that is worth knowing going in. Playing in focused sessions rather than marathon runs is probably the right approach - the humour breathes better that way and the bullet-hell intensity stops being exhausting. There were also some minor technical reports of startup freezes and cutscene stutters at launch, though nothing that critically breaks the experience. For fans of comedy FPS games with a Ratchet-and-Clank-shaped hole in their library, or anyone who remembers TimeSplitters fondly and wants something equally unhinged but fresher, this punches well above what a debut from a three-person studio has any right to deliver. The handcraft is visible, the weapons are weird in the best way, and Beartana's deadpan attitude carries more character than most AAA sidekicks manage with full voice-acting budgets.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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