Tiny Bee is a fun time waster of a game for your Windows Phone. For the lack of a better word, it's a slider game much like Rainbow Rapture. Instead of navigating a rainbow, you're sending a tiny bee over hill and dale.
Tiny Bee has two gaming modes, Scoreloop integration, and a handful of achievements to pursue. Graphics and animations are nice, sound effects good and with three levels of difficulty Tiny Bee won't grow stale quick.
From the main menu you can review the game's achievements and settings, access Scoreloop and Tiny Bee's Facebook page and view other games from the developer, Nurogames. Tapping the settings gear pulls up a handful of buttons that will launch the help screens, mute the music, mute the sound effects and view the About screen.
As far as game play is concerned, you have two options; Endless Play and Story Play. Endless Play is just that... play as far as you can go before the rain sets in. Story Play isn't much different but you have three difficulty levels to choose from.
Controlling your bee is simple. Tap and hold the screen to have the bee dive or race across the ground, release the screen to have him lift off the ground. Along the way, you collect honeycombs, pollen, honey drops for extra points. You can also gain points for smooth landings and lose points for rough landings. Naturally, the further you travel the more points you can rack up.
At the bottom of the screen is your game duration graphic. You are trying to see how far you can get before the rain storm catches up with your bee. The faster and more air time the further away you keep the storms. Run the ground too much and the clouds inch closer at a faster pace.
Both game modes include the same regions or levels. Each level is separated by a pond and as you approach the water, your bee is hurled across the pond. The result is a boost in speed and momentum.
After playing Tiny Bee for the past few days, I found it to be an enjoyable time waster. I'm still scratching my head on the differences between Story and Endless Modes because I've yet to see a story line to the latter. It's not an issue to really detract from the game because the Advanced and Heavy levels keeps things interesting.
There are a few areas of improvement with Tiny Bee. First, settings aren't saved once you exit the game. So if you prefer the game music muted, you'll need to mute things every time. Second, if you have to end a game in progress, there's no way of saving things. This can suck if you've made it up in levels and have to call it quits for whatever reason.
While there is room for some improvement, Tiny Bee is an entertaining game. There are two versions of Tiny Bee to choose from on the Windows Phone Marketplace. There it Tiny Bee Free that is free, ad supported and limits how far you can play in the Story Mode. Then you have Tiny Bee that is ad free and currently running $.99.
