Need to blow off some steam after a late night work session? You know — the ones where you’re up until 12:30am working on some problem. Then, when you try and go to bed. you’re still left thinking about it? You need this game.
Angry Birds is the perfect distraction from the daily grind. Essentially, you have some birds that are pissed off at some ugly green pig-like things, and in order to get back at them, they let you fling them across the screen from a giant slingshot. The objective? Blow shit up. Knock stuff down. Kill the Green Piggies.
The title Angry Birds fits the sound track perfectly. The developers have done a perfect job illustrating the sound of some pissed off birds. It cracks me up every single time I give it a listen.
The Gameplay
The first couple of times I played this game, it felt like just another casual game. I fully expected to spend a couple hours with it, then never play it again, but it’s been kicking around on my iPhone for a while now. It pretty much got me through down time during the Olympics. It’s pretty safe to say I’m hooked at this point, and if it wasn’t for the ramping up in difficulty, I probably would have retired this game a while ago.
Angry Birds has two episodes to select from. The second is locked, and I still haven’t been able to unlock it yet, so I can’t really comment on the content in the second episode. The first episode has three major levels of game play, each of which has twenty-one stages in it. The game starts off very simple, but starts getting difficult pretty quickly.
Every now and then, they introduce a new type of bird, that has distinct characteristic from previous birds. For instance, blue birds multiply when you tap the screen. So instead of one big bird it turns into three little birds. White birds lay an explosive egg when you tap the screen. So if you launch a white bird towards a green pig, and tap the screen when doing a fly over, you’ll lay an egg that explodes on impact. It may sound a bit confusing, but you’ll be able to see some game play footage in our upcoming weekly video podcast.
Wrap up
Angry Birds is a $0.99 game that’s well worth the cash. If you’re skeptical about dropping the money on the game you can download a lite version off of iTunes, and try it out first. The simplicity of the game, and the challenge that they present, makes this game an instant classic for me. It’s my 2nd favourite game of 2010 right now.