Rovio releases Angry Birds Space
What do you do when you’ve released your multi-million dollar game on so many platforms that even dogs have had plenty of time to get bored of it? Invent a new version! Angry Birds Space is the fourth version of Angry Birds, the other three being vanilla Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, and Angry Birds Rio. The new iteration has the pigs and birds take off into space, where the reality of gravity and lack there of is the basis for the gameplay changes.
Whereas the previous versions have more or less been about shooting pigs from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen, both the direction you shoot, place you shoot from and some other key elements have changed. In zero gravity you have to make sure your bird doesn’t fly off into nowhere, while planets and other objects will attract any birds or other objects that come within their gravity field. This opens up for situations where you have to bend the flight path of your birds around gravity fields in order to get them to the target, and also opens up for killing pigs by knocking them from zero gravity and into a gravity field that pulls them down to a planet. Gravity fields are slow enough that it’s possible to actually enter a decaying orbit around a planet, where you go around the planet completely several times before finally crash landing. I even had a level early on where a bird went into some weird figure 8 pattern where it kept orbiting two planets for half a minute before finally crashing into something.
These new gameplay changes definitely freshen up the gameplay, and I can’t help but remember the low gravity power up in Worms as a very similar situation. Sounds and animations have also been “spacified”, and there’s a new bird that I haven’t unlocked yet somewhere in the 60 levels. I got bored of Angry Birds pretty quickly myself and never really got into the updates or the two sequels, and this game is unlikely to change that. For people who can’t get enough of hurling birds at pigs though, this is definitely a good day to spend $3.
Unfortunately those $3 aren’t the only ones you’ll end up paying, as both extra levels and the eagle costs more money though in-app purchases (on the iPad, I don’t know how this is handled on Android). The eagle was a one time purchase to unlock in the first game, but is now a single-use item that you buy in packs of 20 in order to get past difficult levels. Rovio is milking the title for everything it can, and these extra costs just proves that.
[iTunes | Google Play]
