Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Highly addictive"

Some green pigs have stolen the bird's eggs, and are hiding inside fortresses. What's a flock to do? Use an oversized slingshot to fire themselves into the fortresses to bring them down of course!

Ok so the story's a bit weird, but it does provide an excellent excuse for flinging various birds from a slingshot into structures and the pigs nearby. In the PS3/PSP version, players aim with the left stick and fling with the X button. The pigs must all be defeated within a level to progress and a moderate tap is all that is required. But how to deliver the tap (or in some cases, an almighty crash)? Do you aim the birds directly at the pigs, or bring down part of the level's structure on top of them? You score for each pig defeated, every piece of structure damaged or destroyed, and every bird you didn't fire at the pigs when they're all gone.

The birds come in various types; red ones are purely ballistic, blue ones split into three cluster birds, yellow ones accelerate through the air, black ones explode with massive force, and white ones drop explosive payloads. The bird's special move is activated in mid-air by the player with the X button. The levels themselves feature structures built from either glass, wood or stone with increasing resistance, each with weight and which react differently to the different bird attacks.

For each level you are given a set number of birds in a set order. So the strategy is to use the birds as given as best you can to attack the pigs. Sometimes getting all the pigs is easy. The trick is trying to find the optimum way to rack up enough points to get a full three star rating, and often it involves trying not to use all your birds, because they give big point bonuses. With a large number of levels and therefore scenarios to attempt, this game is not likely to get old soon.

The game's physics i.e. materials responding to gravity, forces, explosions etc, are totally believable. They do however sometimes generate random results, meaning some levels can only be completed by a lucky shot, and these shots are few and far between, and hard to replicate. Coupled with the high difficulty of just nailing all the pigs in some levels, the game does have some frustrating levels that detract from the overall experience. The game's graphics are not on par with the PlayStation 3 and the sound is a bit loud on the same console, but this is a game designed for a phone.

Angry Birds has been downloaded an amazing number of times and not without reason. I daresay it might not be to everyone's taste, but I have a friend who loves it... and he hates strategy games! If you don't already have it on your phone, you can port this across to the PS3/PSP, and I hear they are working on the Xbox 360 and other console versions. Soon you'll have no excuse not to have it.