
We all love it...
What could be said about Angry Birds that hasn’t already been said by tech entrepreneurs, app developers and gaming fans? It’s a massive example of success in the mobile application market and has spawned a lot of copycats and startup companies that are attempting to replicate its level of success. Let’s take a look at the gameplay and see if we can discern just what makes the game so fun to play.
At the most basic level, Angry Birds is a physics simulator where you launch one object at another. The earliest examples of these types of games were the cannon games where you battled against each other by launching missiles and projectiles across vast swatches of land in an attempt to destroy your enemy’s cannon. While these games were fun for their time, they quickly grew out of favor with the advent of 3d graphics and first person shooters.
However the mobile market has reopened a lot of the market to those “vintage” games because it’s not as feasible to launch a Halo title on a mobile application yet. Angry Birds took advantage of this by putting a slight twist on the old cannon model. They created cute characters – birds as the protagonists and evil pigs as the antagonists – instead of lifeless cannons. Then they decided to give you the option to fire different types of birds out of your slingshot. Each bird has a unique ability in lieu of a standard parabolic flight path – though the most basic bird has this feature. This neat twist opens the game up to a whole host of unique implications that let you really get your creativity involved in the game. It’s been said that there are infinite combinations of launch patterns to do on each level, and there are even multiple ways to reach the three star rating for each level.
The birds that you get for each level are pre-determined, so it’s up to you to figure out how to utilize what you’re given against the environment and pigs that you have to destroy to maximize your destruction and score. I’ve found that the best strategies involve front-loading the damage onto the earlier birds and then using the other, more tactical birds to do the “clean up work.” This has worked really well for me as far as nailing all of the three star ratings, but I must admit that it did take quite a while before I was able to get all of them completed.
As soon as I did finish, Rovio Mobile released a holiday version of the game with all new levels and a new bird. I knew my life was over at that moment because I had just completed the original version and was about to actually do something productive with my life, but the holiday version sucked me back in. Eventually I defeated that as well and have nothing but fond memories of my times playing Angry Birds.
















