Apico Review

Bees are truly wonderful animals. Not only do they make the world go round, they also look beautiful and have winning personalities to boot. Very little of this apian spirit is recreated by Apico, I’m afraid.

Apico is a pixel-graphic life-sim that’s all about beekeeping. You’ve got the staples of standard outdoor crafting games: chopping trees for wood, planting acorns to grow trees, mining stone. And, right at the core, a bunch of bee business including hives, honeycomb, breeding, the lot. There’s also a series of machines that you can use for crafting. Creating high-value items like flavoured Apicola involves a long process with many different machines and resources feeding into the finished product. But it sells for a good price, and money is essential for upgrades.

Set across an archipelago, Apico definitely looks the part, its retro graphics going for a clean, 8-bit look which fits the game perfectly. In particular, the integration of various UI elements has been done with a real flair for design, and the basic pixel models for the characters are cute and functional. With a limited palette, Apico introduces some impressive lighting effects and the relaxing soundtrack means you’ll have no trouble sinking hours into life in this world. I’m sure Apico is easier to play with a mouse and keyboard, but the fact that it works so well on Switch—the layout adapts intelligently between handheld and TV mode, for example—demonstrates just how well crafted this interface is.

Despite this, there were some unfortunate bugs plaguing this version of the game, including a wonky crafting menu that lets you use the materials for one recipe on a completely different one. You actually have to go out of your way to avoid this, which is a problem large enough that you wonder how it passed pre-release testing. There are also pretty regular, fairly severe cases of lag which make the game frustrating to play at times, which is a real shame. Hopefully, both these issues will be fixed in a patch soon.

Apico’s world is small in many ways. Although it features four biomes, there isn’t a great deal of variety within each. The game map is pretty constricted, and there’s little encouragement to spread out into the world. I effectively squatted in grandma’s house for the first ten hours or so of my run, partly because the game nudges you towards doing just that. All sorts of machines are already placed in the starting location, and it’s far easier to build out from there and keep everything on hand. There are reasons to explore, but everything is so transportable that you don’t really need to set up a second camp or venture far from home at all regularly.

There is a satisfying amount of depth to the game, however, especially if you explore the bee stats and their impact. The breeding process is complex, and there’s a collecting mechanic which should help you sort the top bees from the rest. The game can be very slow when you’re waiting to accumulate money early on. However, if you invest in machine upgrades as soon as possible, and recognise that lots of the environment can be harvested and sold, progress can be fairly quick.

At its best, Apico is a highly addictive feedback loop—you can easily lose hours farming honey and upgrading resources as you go. At times, you might wonder quite why you’re doing so, the experience veering into the somewhat mundane and repetitive. Perhaps the game is making a meta-reference to what a bee’s existence must be like: mechanical, futile, compelling. While that all might sound quite dull, it genuinely is enjoyable in the moment and Apico quickly rose up my list of games by playtime. The game sets out very clear challenges, in the form of tasks alongside information in a tutorial, and much like Animal Crossing’s Nook rewards, these are very effective in driving you on.

But, for all Apico’s qualities, there are some strange omissions. Think about the last game you played that featured bees: Animal Crossing, Don’t Starve, maybe A Link to the Past, even. Bees were just a side-event, but what did they all have in common: a bug net, with which to catch said bees. How can you create a game all about bees and not come to the realisation that people like catching things with bug nets? There’s a conspicuous distance between you and your bees which I wish had been smaller. Just some more interesting visual differences, a greater presence on the main screen, or any way in which I can actually interact with my damn bees would be nice!

If you like bees and crafting games, I would still recommend Apico. It’s one of the best-looking retro-styled games I’ve played in a long time, and with just a bit of polish and some fixes, it could be an essential choice for all life-sim fans too. The publishers, too, are genuine financial supporters of several bee-conservation charities, so there’s a feel-good aspect to this game that should leave you with a warm buzz—and a compulsion to spin out just one more drop of honey…