Angry Birds: The magic’s beginning to fade
Hyderabad: The year is 2011 and sitting in an office in Ahmedabad during my summer internship, I was waiting for my next assignment while watching the latest episode of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ on my Blackberry Curve. The show’s cast talks about being unable to live without ‘Angry Birds’ and I can’t help but […]
Published Date - 5 February 2022, 05:27 PM
Hyderabad: The year is 2011 and sitting in an office in Ahmedabad during my summer internship, I was waiting for my next assignment while watching the latest episode of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ on my Blackberry Curve. The show’s cast talks about being unable to live without ‘Angry Birds’ and I can’t help but finish the episode, open the game’s Chrome extension and pop some pigs. Those of you who “feel me”, yes, those were the days!
As smartphones became slabs of glass, ‘Angry Birds’, along with other games like ‘Fruit Ninja’, Cut the Rope, and Temple Run’ became a staple game on mobile.
In the last 12 years, the franchise has launched numerous iterations and cross-overs, (remember the ones with ‘Star Wars and Transformers’?) experimented with a variety of genres (remember ‘Epic’ the RPG?) but it has watched with no avail as players have slowly but surely turned away from the once beloved franchise. With ‘Journey’, Rovio has attempted to go back to the franchise’s roots in order to revive the magic.
‘Journey’ is classic catapult-based piggy popping and bird rescuing in terms of gameplay. There are a bunch of new birds with newer abilities, new objects in the puzzles that include birds in cages, and a classic ‘Mario’-like mystery box. All the new developments showcase how ‘Angry Birds’ should be experienced in 2022.
The game has also moved away from the classic star-based awards after the completion of each level and offers the players a variety of levels and terrains in which the puzzles must be solved. Journey’s physics, and projectiles are wonderfully made and the interface is quite intuitive, there is simply nothing wrong with this game in terms of the development or the experience it offers. However, it feels like ‘Journey’ lacks a soul.
A game’s soul means several things, it’s difficult to not sound romantic, but it’s the calling you feel to go back to the game when you are not playing it, it’s the thinking and strategising about it through your day, the moments in a day when you long to play it, I didn’t feel any of that with ‘Journey’.
Has the formula got too stale, is piggy popping simply no longer fun? How is it possible that I can play games from ‘Pokémon’ excitedly every single time but ‘Angry Birds’ couldn’t be something similar? There’s something much bigger that’s wrong with the franchise and I don’t feel it’s something that can be fixed with ‘Journey’.
Give it a try if you wish to play the game but there’s neither nostalgia nor magic in this one. Just some angry birds and some piggies!
Sneak Peek:
Title |
Angry Birds Journey |
Developer |
Rovio Entertainment |
Game Type |
Single Player |
Platforms |
Android and iOS |
Price |
Free to Play |
Verdict:
Innovative Gameplay: |
3 |
Game Handling & Quality |
4 |
Value for Time |
3 |
Overall |
3.3 |
What Stands Out C |
Fails to impress D |
The game is beautiful, its physics top-notch and the variety of birds is a nice blend to the play style |
The game is still the same what it was in 2010-11 and nothing has changed; the formula is now beaten to death |
The different worlds and terrains are well-thought out, a shift from the 3-star focus on completing levels is well done |
Despite the new levels, kinds of birds, and the stunning new looks, I had absolutely no reason to come back to the game the next day. |
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