Newsflash!: Forget cats and dogs being at each other’s throats or the well documented animosity between spiders and flies, because it’s the fact that a flock of irate birds have declared war on a herd of green pigs over some stolen eggs which is now (probably) sending shockwaves through the animal kingdom.
Yup, that’s the brilliantly nonsensical premise that Rovio Mobile have cooked up for their latest, Angry Birds. And combining easy to pick up, but impossible to put down, Ragdoll Blaster stylee gameplay, with colourful and cartoony graphics, the game is an utter joy to play.
Those crafty pigs have constructed “castles” from planks of wood, panes of glass, and anything else they could get their trotters on. The aim of the game to catapult kamikaze birds (sort of Pixar-esque chaps with Colin Farrell eyebrows!) at these makeshift shelters, splattering the swine hiding inside.
Gameplay is kept simple: one finger is all that’s needed to launch these unusual projectiles at the enemy. But the aerial assault is soon spiced up by different varieties of birds, each with their own destructive properties, being put at your disposal as the game progresses.
Some explode, others act like cluster bombs, the yellow ones are basically guided missiles and so forth. The trick is figuring out when, where, and how to best use your squawking ammo to tear apart the fortifications piece by piece, while using the littlest amount of feathered friends possible.
The title has wonderful fun with its bird-brained ideas, gets extremely addictive, and the titular characters positively ooze charm. If I had to peck holes in Angry Birds, then perhaps the balancing of difficulty levels is slightly off; some stages can be cleared in seconds by mindlessly chucking birds, while others are more complex and will need to be tackled numerous times before victory is yours.
However the game more than makes up for these niggles by offering a huge amount of stages (63 in total), great replayability, and lots of laughs along the way. Smashing fun.
iFanzine verdict: An expertly assembled physics puzzler that gleefully drops an f(un)-bomb on the competition. Angry Birds has wings!
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