Angry Birds (iOS) – a strange definition of free-to-play
The world’s most successful video game gets its first ever sequel, but is it another Angry Birds ruined by greedy in-app purchases?
When you’re talking about a franchise that has been downloaded over 3 billion times it’s hard not to sound churlish when wondering if this sequel has arrived a bit late. When out and about it’s still not hard to spot someone wearing some sort of Angry Birds T-shirt or paraphernalia, and yet it’s obvious that the game’s mainstream popularity peaked a couple of years ago. The response to this inevitable, but not necessarily irreversible, decline is an animated movie due out next year and this: the first sequel the series has ever had.
There have been over a dozen Angry Birds games since the original’s release in 2009, including standalone expansions, spin-offs, and tie-ins with Star Wars and Transformers. But this is the first genuine sequel, with an actual number at the end of its name.
Angry Birds suffers the same problem of many classic games, in that the reason it’s so popular is that it already works extremely well as it is. And so adding any new features risks ruining that balance. And before anyone gets too snobbish about it, Angry Birds is a good game. Not a deep or complex one but its simple premise has always made great use of the touchscreen interface, and compared to things like Flappy Bird it’s definitely a game that deserves its success.
We’re going to go out on a limb and guess that if you’re reading this you’re not one of the 4 billion people on the planet that haven’t played the original game or one of its variants. But either way the concept in Angry Birds 2 is predictably similar: pigs have (for reasons we’re not sure has ever been explained) stolen a clutch of bird eggs and you have to get them back by… firing the parents out of a slingshot so that they knock down a bunch of Jenga-like structures that the pigs are hiding in.
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