Angry Birds Space
High jinks in low gee
iGamer Such was the original's stellar success it's no wonder resisting the pull of Angry Birds Space is proving more difficult than escaping an event horizon. Ask the ten million or so folk who've apparently downloaded it since last Friday, and they'll tell you. You simply can't mess with universal laws - you're going to get sucked in, no matter what.
It's a good thing then, that while Angry Birds Space isn't quite the revolution many had hoped for, Rovio serves up enough novelty and distinguishing mechanics to ensure the game is a true and worthy sequel to its fowl-flinging phenomenon.
Its one big idea is, of course, space. You're still out to get the pigs who stole your eggs, but this time those pesky porcine pilferers have gone interplanetary. They're holed up in lunar domes, orbiting in space stations or cowering behind a million tonnes of space detritus.
The central mechanic remains unchanged, however: catapulting your birds into the scenery to wreak as much swine-squashing destruction as possible.
Only this time there's a lot more – or is that less - gravity to contend with. And Rovio puts the new, low-gee environment to great use. Some levels require you to use gravitational wells around large bodies – handily delineated by translucent spheres - to alter your trajectories.
Others require you to ram pigs into declining orbits to bring them crashing down onto planetary surfaces. While others task you with playing galactic billiards by knocking asteroids and space junk towards the hapless porkers.
It's a great twist on the Angry Birds formula. Within minutes you'll be reaching escape velocity, slingshotting around twin moons and raining down meteors on enemies. Often all at the same time, thanks to Rovio's ingenious level design, which serves up a constant stream of gravitational puzzles far more varied than the original game and its spin-offs.
COMMENTS
Lots of luck
There's definitely an element of the random in which way things fall. I've previously started a level (in the "original") where the pieces "settle" slightly at the start of the level -- on one attempt (and only one attempt), a pig on a high tower rolled off to its doom before I'd fired a single shot.
Penguin ... well, it's a bird innit?
What cloud?
Got it on the 4S and my iPad. Only frustration is you can't put down the game on the phone and pick it up on the pad in the same place. In this day and age that should surely be a given?
I think to say it relies on luck rather than skill is a bit unfair. Fluking through with one or two stars is easy enough on some levels, but getting 3 stars on them all doesnt come through fluke. That takes some consideration before you punt your pidgeon.
Sorry, no.
The "fluke" tag is entirely justified. There's plenty of times I've looked like I've been on for a one-shot win, but one plank has fallen awkwardly and blocked everything, making the level uncompletable. That difference between a perfect win and a complete fail is too tiny to be under my control -- AB is largely luck.
Swine-squashing subjugation by assorted angry avians :-)
or even "pig popping punishment"
