Angry Birds Review - Moving Target

[mightbe]

Product: Angry Birds
Platform: iPhone/iPod Touch and Nokia N900
Price: $0.99

Enter the new cinematic trailer for Angry Birds! Recently added was a couple of new .

In my search to find quality games that exist on platforms outside of just the iPhone/iPod Touch realm, I came across the avian flinging fun that is Rovio's Angry Birds. Unfortunately, the only other platform it's currently available on is Nokia's N900 and I've not met anybody who's packing one of these bad boys yet.

Coming in at less than a buck and contains more than fifty levels, you'd be hard pressed to find a game with more personality and gameplay at the same or a better price point. So what do these birds bring the mobile party?

They've taken your eggs and bunkered down. Don't let the flithy pigs get away with this!

Just about anyone who ever had a set of blocks as a kid has played a real life version of Angry Birds where they fling things at teetering towers to level them to the ground. So it's very easy to pick up on the gameplay concept right away. Draw back the sling shot, angle your angered avian, and let it fly is the simple recipe for destruction.

Your goal is simple: pop your green porcine foes by knocking them off ledges, crushing them with blocks, or a direct hit from any of your five different types of birds.

Exploding bird bombs dropped from the massive white birds will give you a good straight vertical vector of attack.

The controls work well with zooming working in the predictable way and pulling back the sling shot is easy to get a feel for right away. For some reason I feel like it should pull back a bit further to give you a better feel of just how much power you're putting behind your bird but that's a small nit pick in an otherwise solid interface.

They layouts of the levels are varied, interesting, and will cause you to use your birds in a variety of ways to get at particularly well defended pigs. For example, instead of manually bursting the black bomb birds, it's often times a good strategy to fling them into a structure to allow them to penetrate a bit before the blow to achieve greater heights of destruction.

White tracer arcs from your previous shot can help you judge positioning of your next bird launching for maximum effect.

You'll progress on to the next level as long as there are no pigs left by the time you run out of birds. This can be somewhat frustrating when you're stuck on a level for many attempts without a way to skip it but in my experience, very few of the levels took me more than a few minutes and a half dozen tries to power through. Thankfully, there is virtually no loading time in between resets of the stage so you can try out odd shots without feeling like you're wasting your time.

You sir, look like plinko. I *love* plinko.

At the core of Angry Birds is a ridiculously solid physics simulation on a portable platform. Things fall in the way you think they should and you're very seldom left without an idea of how to improve your vector of attack. This week Rovio even added two new sets of levels and the ability to play your own music during the game so they're clearly dedicated to improving their products without charging any additional premiums.

So plop down your one dollar and get your copy today and come back here to brag about your high scores! Taking screenshots is easy, simply hold down your menu button and click the top power button on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Moving Target is a weekly mobile gaming feature by Curt "Mot Wakorb" Lecaptain and Rob "mightbe" Schuster. Check CoG every Saturday for updates. Hit us up if there's something you'd like us to cover.

[Spigot]

Angry Birds is a fantastic game. It's incredibly addictive and so silly yet challenging that you can't stop playing.

[TrackZero]

Buying it now, sold!

[Chris_D]

I grabbed it and found it ok... but it seems like I have to zoom out every time at the start of a level. The initial zoom means I can only see the slingshot, and the pigs are way out of view. Maybe I'm missing something.

[mightbe]

Originally Posted by Chris_D

I grabbed it and found it ok... but it seems like I have to zoom out every time at the start of a level. The initial zoom means I can only see the slingshot, and the pigs are way out of view. Maybe I'm missing something.

Initial zoom level seems intent on making sure you see what kind of birds you have available to you. I always pan over and check out the pig setup right after which is normally at the same zoom level.

I always zoom all the way out before chucking birds though. I suppose a quick check to see if this is your first time playing this level and then zooming you to max if it's not would be handy. It's not like it takes more than a third of a second to zoom at the beginning of each attempt though.

[Purple Santa]

Sold! Great review again.