Angry Birds Review :

I feel Angry Birds has garnered way more success than it deserved, and I feel even team Rovio must be aware of it somewhere (More so since they did not even write the physics that was used in the game). While most people will like to back-track AB’s success to this reason or that, I am sure no one will really want to put their money on a new game being a big hit based on something really nice or cool in it.

It’s a little bit like the way cricket commentators go about their job. Any stroke that yields a boundary is more likely to be a brilliant shot than a stroke that is played brilliantly but haplessly does not yield a boundary or a six. Judgement really needs to be sepearated from eventual success or failure for it to be genuine.

It may be a fact that a lot of us find uncomfortable to face, but deep down all of us know that there is a lot of randomness behind any major success or failure.

Sometime back I had read this about the secret behind AB’s success, that a professional skier had mentioned AB as his favorite game on National television, after which it went ballistic.

Quite often there is really not too much logic behind why something goes wildly viral while something better ends up a damp squib. I really don’t think there is much sense in attributing AB’s success to its game-play value / user experience.

For starters the idea of hitting large stones with soft furry birds is very non-fun.
It would have been much more fun to hit the stack of stone / glass / wood with something hard and with a well defined shape.

I don’t exactly know the cognitive bases for this so let me use a few examples.

Impact gives a good feel with hard and slightly heavy things generally. Just imagine yourself hitting a hard cricket ball with a cricket bat, and compare that to the feel you get when you hit a soft stress ball and you might be able to see my point. Its not that you cannot play cricket with a stress ball, but it just does not feel good.

Secondly my actions do not seem to have much effect in the game and I can’t make sense of the physics. I can’t understand why some precariously poised pieces of wood and stone will refuse to budge even if hit hard with the ammunition.

It feels as if I am starting with a basic disadvantage. And quite often I get a feel of banging my head against a wall that refuses to budge. Even if the wall does give way in the end and I am rewarded, it does not qualify as a lot of fun for me.

Lastly, I am given absolutely no choice in playing new levels. If I am stuck at a certain level, until I finish it I cannot play any new level, because all un-played levels and chapters are locked, I can’t even do as much as to take a look at what interesting challenges lie ahead to get motivated about finishing the current level.


The graphics are definitely good and the sounds are a lot of fun indeed, but all in all the soul of the game is quite uncool, slow, a tad unfair and very very restrictive. How a game like this has caught people’s imagination and become one of the greatest successes in gaming history is a conundrum that I can only attribute to randomness or to the game's timing coinciding with the explosion in smart-phone penetration.

But I am open to any counter views or to the suggestion that I am differently wired for fun than a lot of poeple or to the possibility that I am missing something majorly good about AB, in which case I am eagerly waiting for soome-one to enlighten me .