Angry Birds is a casual puzzle game developed by Rovio Entertainment. The game follows a flock of birds as they try to retake their stolen eggs from a group of green pigs.
Gameplay[ | ]
In Angry Birds, the player controls a flock of multi-colored birds that are attempting to retrieve their eggs, which have been stolen by a group of hungry green pigs. In each stage of the gameplay, enemy pigs are sheltered by structures made of various materials such as wood, glass, and stone resembling children's toy building blocks. The objective of the game is to eliminate all the pigs on the level. Using a slingshot, players launch a limited set of birds with the goal of either striking the enemy pigs directly or damaging their surrounding structures, causing the blocks to collapse and pop the pigs. The player must set the angle and force of the bird's travel by pulling back on the slingshot (using intuitive touch-controls in the mobile versions). The launch process is quick and casual, with no visible trajectory data, and a player simply selects a point in the X-Y field behind the launch post from which the virtual slingshot will be released. In various stages of the game, additional objects such as TNT crates and rocks are incorporated into the structures, and power-ups may be used to enhance the birds to attack hard-to-reach pigs. Also hidden in the levels, players can unlock bonus levels by collecting golden eggs.
There are several different types of birds used in the game, distinguished by their color and shape. In the earliest levels only the basic red cardinal whose name is Red is available. As the player advances through the game additional types of birds become available. Some birds are effective against particular materials, and some have special abilities that may be activated by the player while the bird is airborne. For example, Chuck, a canary speeds up, Bomb, a loon explodes, hence the name, a bluebird named Jay fragments from his siblings, Jake and Jim, a Leghorn hen called Matilda can drop an egg-shaped projectile, a galah named Stella can trap objects in bubbles, Hal, an emerald toucanet boomerangs back, a giant cardinal named Terence; similar to Red, does more damage to structures than his smaller counterparts, and a Jamaican oriel named Bubbles expands and inflates. The pigs also vary, with hardiness relative to their size. Small pigs are weaker and are easily vanquished by direct hits or by debris from the damaged structures, while larger pigs are able to withstand more damage before succumbing to defeat. In addition, some pigs wear hats or armor, making them even more resistant to damage.
Each level starts with the quantity, types, and firing order of birds predetermined. If all of the pigs are eliminated after the last bird is launched, the level is cleared and the next level is unlocked. If all of the birds run out and the pigs are not defeated, the level failed and must be repeated. Points are scored for each pig defeated as well as for damage to, or destruction of, structures, and hefty bonus points are awarded for any unused birds. Upon completing each level, players receive one, two, or three stars depending on the score received. Players are encouraged to repeat any previously beaten levels in which the full three stars weren't awarded in order to fully master them and earn the full three star rating.
Development[ | ]
In early 2009, Rovio was in the state of bankruptcy, the staff began reviewing proposals for potential games. One such proposal came from senior game designer Jaakko Iisalo in the form of a simulated screenshot featuring some angry-looking birds with no visible legs or wings. While the picture gave no clue as to what type of game was being played, the staff liked the characters, and the team elected to design a game around them. In early 2009, physics games, such as Crush the Castle, were popular flash-based web games, so the Rovio team was inspired by these games. During the development of Angry Birds, the staff realized the birds needed an enemy. At the time, the "swine flu" epidemic was in the news, so the staff made the birds' enemies pigs. Angry Birds was the studio's 52nd produced game and on its initial release, the game did not sell many copies. After Angry Birds was a featured app on the UK App Store in February 2010 and quickly reached No.1 there, it reached the No. 1 spot on the paid apps chart in the US App Store in the middle of 2010 and then stayed there for 275 days. The initial cost to develop Angry Birds was estimated to exceed €100,000, not including costs for the subsequent updates. For the iOS version, Rovio partnered with distributor Chillingo to publish the game to the App Store. Chillingo claimed to have participated in final game polishing, such as adding visible trajectory lines, pinch to zoom, pigs' grunts, birds' somersaults on landing. Since then Rovio has self-published almost all of the later ports of the game, with the exception of the PSP version, which was produced under license by Abstraction Games.
When Rovio began writing new versions of the game for other devices, new issues came to light. As the team began working on a version for Android systems, they observed a large number of configurations of device types and versions of the Android software. The number of combinations of software version, processor speed and even user interfaces was significantly larger than that for the iOS version. Ultimately, the team settled on a minimum set of requirements, even though that left nearly 30 types of Android phones unable to run the game, including some newly released phones. It was released on October 15, 2010. One month after the initial release on Android, Rovio Mobile began designing a lite version of the game for these other devices.
In early 2010, Rovio began developing a version of Angry Birds for Facebook. The project became one of the company's largest, with development taking over a year. The company understood the challenges of transplanting a game concept between social platforms and mobile/gaming systems. In a March 2011 interview, Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka said, "you can’t take an experience that works in one environment and one ecosystem and force-feed it onto another. It's like Zynga. They can’t just take FarmVille and throw it on mobile and see what sticks. The titles that have been successful for them on mobile are the ones they’ve built from the ground up for the platform." The Facebook version incorporate social-gaming concepts and in-game purchases and entered beta-testing in April 2011; the game became officially available on Facebook in February 2012.
Improvements for the game include the ability to synchronize the player's progress across multiple devices; for example, a player who completes a level on an Android phone can log into their copy of the game on an Android tablet and see the same statistics and level of progress.
Reception[ | ]
In reviews, Angry Birds has been mostly acclaimed by critics. Chris Holt of Macworldcalled the game "an addictive, clever, and challenging puzzler", and Pocket Gamer's Keith Andrew said Angry Birds is "a nugget of puzzling purity dished out with relish aplenty". Jonathan Liu of Wired News wrote that "going for the maximum number of stars certainly adds a lot of replay value to a fairly extensive game".
Reviews for the first versions of the game that did not use a touch-screen, the PlayStation 3/PSP version and the Windows version, have also been positive, but with some disagreement over the different interfaces. Will Greenwald of PC Magazine, in his review of the PlayStation Network version, said that the control scheme on these platforms is good, "but they're not nearly as satisfying as the touch-screen controls found on smartphone versions", and that the PlayStation 3 version appeared "blocky and unpleasant, like a smartphone screen blown up to HDTV size". Conversely, Greg Miller of IGN preferred the analog control setup of the PSP version, saying it "offered me tiny variances in control that I don't feel like I get with my fat finger on a screen". While giving the game a positive review, Miller concluded, "There's no denying that Angry Birds is fun, but it could use polish – such as sharper visuals, a better price and smoother action." Damien McFerrin of British website Electric Pig reviewed the PC version, saying "the mouse-driven control method showcases many distinct advantages over its finger-focused counterpart".
Angry Birds has also been described critically as impossible to understand the playing rules criteria by game critic Chris Schiller of Eurogamer.net, which has 'a contemptuous attitude towards its players, keeping them just frustrated enough not to switch off and play something else instead.'
Angry Birds became the top-selling paid application on Apple's UK App Store in February 2010, and reached the top spot on the US App Store a few weeks later, where it remained until October 2010. Since release, the free, limited version of Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 11 million times for Apple's iOS, and the full-featured paid version has been downloaded nearly 7 million times as of September 2010. The Android version of the game was downloaded more than 1 million times within the first 24 hours of release, even though the site crashed at one point due to the load, and over 2 million downloads in its first weekend. Rovio receives approximately US$1 million per month in revenue from the advertising that appears in the free Android version.
According to Rovio, players logged more than 5 million hours of game time each day across all platforms, with the series having 200 million monthly active users, as of May 2012. In November 2010, Digital Trends stated that "with 36 million downloads, Angry Birds is one of the most mainstream games out right now". MSNBC's video game news blog has written that "[n]o other game app comes close" to having such a following. The Christian Science Monitor has remarked, "Angry Birds has been one of the great runaway hits of 2010". In December 2010, in honor of the one-year anniversary of the release of Angry Birds, Rovio Mobile announced that the game had been downloaded 50 million times, with more than 12 million on iOS devices and 10 million on Android. By January 2014, the Angry Birds series had reached 2 billion downloads, including Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio, Angry Birds Space, Angry Birds Star Wars I and II, and Angry Birds Go! On Christmas Day 2011 alone, 6.5 million copies of the various Angry Birds games were downloaded across all supported platforms.
In the history of the Apple App Store, Angry Birds holds the record for most days at the top of the Paid Apps chart, having spent a total of 275 days at the No.1 position; Angry Birds Rio has been No.1 for a total of 23 days, ranking ninth on the list. In Apple's "iTunes Rewind" list of the most popular iTunes Store media for 2011, Angry Birds was the top-selling paid iPhone/iPod app on the App Store and its free version was the fourth-most downloaded. The game's two special-edition versions, Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio, were also ranked in the top 10 for paid iPhone/iPod apps, while its iPad-exclusive Angry Birds HD versions were the top-selling and top-downloaded iPad apps for the year. Mattel also made a few board games based on the app. These were called Angry Birds: Knock on Wood, Angry Birds: On Thin Ice, and Angry Birds: Mega Smash.
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