Angry Birds Space Review

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Game Description

Angry Birds has gained massive popularity due to its winning combination of brain teasing puzzles and action packed gameplay. Angry Birds Space builds on this foundation by adding a fresh new spin to the original concept. Prepare to fling birds around in the deep, dark depths of space!

It's Out of This World

The first Angry Birds games took place on Earth. In Angry Birds Space, all that changed when an extraterrestrial force took off with the bird's precious eggs. Powered up by traveling through a super wormhole, these birds have taken to space like fish to water and are ready to do whatever it takes to get their eggs back!

Physics-based Puzzles With a New Gravity Twist

Angry Birds Space brings unique challenges to the table thanks to the new setting in space. The goal in this game is to pop the pigs who are floating around inside of oxygen filled bubbles. To further complicate things, these pigs have also constructed elaborate forts to protect themselves from attack. The pigs have chosen their locations wisely, and it's up to you to find ways to penetrate their defenses.

The pigs usually center their bases around a planet of some sort, and each of these tiny planets has its own gravitational pull which will influence the flight path and speed of your birds. Birds will spiral around in a planet's orbit and gain speed from centrifugal force until colliding with a solid object. This means some of the fastest and most frenetic gameplay ever!

In addition, some planets are positioned closely enough together to have overlapping gravity fields. This means that you can daisy-chain your birds from one planet to another. The possibilities are endless!

Go Your Own Way

Unlike the original Angry Birds, Angry Birds Space gives you full control over the catapult. You may shoot the birds both clockwise and counterclockwise as you see fit. As long as the pigs are destroyed, the level is considered clear. Feel free to experiment with several different techniques in order to get a 3 star ranking!

A helpful new indicator also pops up to aid you in setting the trajectory for each shot, eliminating the guesswork and allowing you to focus on defeating those swine once and for all.

New Birds, Powers and Bosses

Ice Bird is a welcome addition to the arsenal and is able to turn anything into ice on contact. Some of the birds can be manipulated in flight and others even have the power to create black holes. There are also challenging boss fights that take skill and strategy to defeat.

Free Updates and Future Levels

Angry Birds is well known for surprising their players with new levels long after the game's initial release, and that standard is continued in Angry Birds Space. These updates add to the replay value that fans love.

Angry Birds Space is a puzzle game on steroids that guarantees hours of senseless fun for anyone. Aim true and show those pigs who's boss!

Angry Birds Space Review

Angry Birds in Spaaaaaaaace!

If there’s one thing that a lot of critics have to say about the Angry Birds series, it’s that it knows how to beat a dead horse. Although the games are always rife with challenge and charm, the gameplay has remained formulaic. Thankfully, Rovio seems to have gotten the message and brought a whole heap of changes with Angry Birds Space.

The series has always thrived with its use of physics, but this game ups the ante by bringing the laws of physics to a place where no Angry Bird has gone before: outer space! If you want to smash up those pigs real good, you’re going to have to contend with gravity, the law of inertia, weightlessness and all those other mishaps you can only find beyond the safety of Earth’s atmosphere.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Squeal!

Rovio tells the story of Angry Birds Space like they have always done; with one of those absolutely delightful animated introductions. It was a day like any other for the birds, until a wormhole suddenly appeared in the sky. From its depths, a giant mechanical monstrosity emerged and seized their eggs.

Somehow, the Bad Piggies have found their way into space, formed a galaxy-spanning empire, and are using their new technology to commit egg-nappings across the stars. They’re about to get another hard lesson that even with their space age technology, the birds should be the last things in the universe to ever tick off. Full of righteous fury, they launch themselves into the wormhole, instantly develop space-faring powers, and get ready for a war of epic proportions!

Still as Charming as Ever

Angry Birds just wouldn’t be Angry Birds if it didn’t have its cartoony personality and zany sense of humor. Angry Birds Space keeps the legacy up even while it adapts everything to the new setting. For instance, the birds have all been given a makeover to look like space-faring superheroes. The red bird wears a Wolverine-like mask, the yellow one has turned purple and donned some Cyclops-like goggles, the blue triplets put on some stylish lightning earpieces, and the Mighty Eagle has turned into the ethereal Space Eagle from beyond the veil of reality.

Despite the changes, they’re still the same Angry Birds that we all know and love. They still have their slingshot, their furious squawks, and the explosive tempers that make them so famous.

Speaking of space, Rovio took full advantage of the new setting to create all sorts of wacky environments. Every level has a specific theme to help set it apart from the rest. The first one seems basic, with you touring a variety of rocky-looking planets. However, things quickly ratchet up as you declare war on a series of ice planets in the second set of levels, planets made entirely out of water, and even one bizarre area where all the celestial bodies are made out of junk food. The guys at Rovio went hog-wild when they set about designing this universe.

The best thing about the visuals is the amount of personality Rovio put into them. The characters never remain static; they react to their surroundings in plausible ways. The birds look angry and determined at the beginning, only to get dazed and exhausted after a few crashes too many.

The Bad Piggies are even more impressive. When things start out, they’ll either be fast asleep or giggling smugly at your antics. Meanwhile, a close call can get them to look nervous or relieved for a few seconds, while a lot of destruction to the buildings around them will put the fear of the butcher in their eyes.

It’s Not Just Another Rehash

If you’ve played any of the Angry Birds games, then Angry Birds Space should immediately be familiar. The Bad Piggies return alongside their ramshackle fortresses, and only the birds and their trusty slingshot can bring them down. Every bird has its own special ability that makes it more suitable for certain situations and against different materials. The red bird makes for a basic but solid projectile, the blue bird can split into three with the press of a button, the black bird can blow up like a bomb, and so on. Using their abilities as wisely and efficiently as possible is the key to success.

However, the setting of Angry Birds Space shakes things up considerably. Gravity has always played a role in the series; you had to always account for the trajectory and momentum of your birds as you launched them after all. With everything taking place in outer space now, all the rules have been turned on their head!

Gravity only exists in a limited radius around planetoids. Inertia is very much in place when birds are launched from the vacuum of space. They don’t arc; they fly in a straight line until something happens to slow them down. That “something” could come in the shape of an asteroid or in the form of a planet’s gravitational field.

The second a bird enters a planet’s atmosphere, the old physics we’re used to seeing kick back in full force as the bird is pulled to the planet’s surface. Depending on the size of the planet, the bird may even loop around it several times before it finally hits the ground. The reverse is also true; birds arc normally when they’re launched from a planet, but as soon as they get out its field of gravity, they’ll move into a straight line forever into empty space.

These simple rules lead to a lot of creative puzzles. You can launch a bird towards either a planet’s north or south poles to hit more tricky pigs and structures. You can use a planet’s gravitational pull to get some much-needed momentum and cover greater distances across the screen. You can destroy pigs floating in space by knocking them into a planet and letting gravity do the rest. You can break up structures floating in space and use the scattering pieces to eliminate the pigs and so on.

More than any other entry in the series, Angry Birds Space forces you to think in multiple directions at once and to use the environment to your advantage. As a result, the destruction is much more fun to watch and more rewarding to invoke.

Old and New Features

Aside from the way gravity changes things, Angry Birds Space also includes a smattering of new and old features to help mix things up. There are the obligatory new birds of course, such as the Ice Bird that first appears in the game’s animated introduction. This guy freezes whatever he crashes into, making those objects much easier to break apart. It can also cause underwater objects to float upward. This new bird is fun and flexible and it will be interesting to see what potential he can bring to later entries in the series.

Boss levels are back and are made to be especially unique. In one, you have to destroy a pig contraption that looks like a futuristic rendition of what can be made in the Bad Piggies spin-off, while another involves taking down a planet-sized pig that has its own field of gravity!

The Space Egg levels are another cool addition. These are bonus stages that you can unlock by getting a three-star score for every level on a single page. Killing pigs is the name of the game as usual, but instead of launching birds, you launch eggs. Eggs aren’t particularly powerful by themselves, but with the press of a button, they can hatch a miniature black hole for a few seconds. Black holes are useful for two reasons; they destroy whatever gets sucked into them and they can throw pigs and debris around if set off correctly. Space Egg levels are fun and they add a whole lot more incentive to perfect your pig-smashing craft.

Those aren’t the only bonus levels to find. Golden Eggs make a return, opening up new challenges when you find and break them apart. These stages are specially designed to stand out from the regular missions. One requires you to break up boxes to expose the pigs hidden inside, while another requires you to destroy structures built in the shape of the classic enemies from Space Invaders. It all adds up to help make the Angry Birds franchise feel remarkably fresh again.

Not So Lucky

Even amidst all the celebration, not everything about Angry Birds Space can be considered a good thing. Luck has always been a factor to success in the Angry Birds series. Sometimes a rock won’t roll as hard as it needs to in order to topple a building, while a flying piece of debris might miss a pig by a millimeter. It’s kind of unavoidable in a physics-based game, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. Unfortunately, luck plays an even bigger factor in Angry Birds Space.

Physics are more important than ever and the greater range of movement means that the margin of error has gone up as well. That’s not to say that beating Angry Birds Space is going to depend entirely on your luck; every level has a logical solution to nabbing those precious three-star ratings. It’s just that getting them might require a few more retries than usual.

Not Much to be Angry About Here

In the end, we can’t complain too much. Angry Birds Space is definitely one of the better entries in the series. The puzzles are more inventive than ever thanks to the new gravity mechanics. The Ice Bird is a cool new addition to the usual roster, the new bonus levels are a lot of fun, and the game is just as wacky as the series has always been.

Get it if you love Angry Birds. Get it even if you’re royally sick of Angry Birds; the innovations it brings to the franchise are just that good. Get it even if you have not played an Angry Birds game at all; it’s a great place to start even with all the new stuff. Whatever your reasons are, just get it!

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