Review: Rovio's Bad Piggies

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The good: Bad Piggies takes the Angry Birds franchise in a fun and challenging direction. You get tons of levels to explore and truly mind-bending puzzles, while keeping the Angry Birds aesthetic.

 

The bad: The added challenge and complexity will probably turn off a large swath of Angry Birds fans. The game is not yet ready for the larger screen on the iPhone 5.

 

The bottom line: If you're up for the challenge, Bad Piggies is a fun and interesting departure from Rovio's earlier games. Offering several levels, fun and funny vehicles to build, and recognizable artwork and characters, this game is a sure hit.

 

Bad Piggies is the latest from Rovio, makers of the mega-hit franchise Angry Birds, but instead of a slingshot destruction game, this time we play as the green pigs, building contraptions to better steal the birds' eggs.

 

Like Angry Birds before it, Bad Piggies makes it easy to dive right in and start playing, but it quickly gets more difficult than the earlier slingshot physics game. In this game, the object is to assemble a "treasure" map piece by piece to lead you to the birds' eggs. You do this by building contraptions from the pieces given, often using parts like wheels, fans, propellers, and more to create machines that will grab a map piece while achieving each level's goals in the time allotted. Sound confusing? Initially it is, and this is what makes Bad Piggies a departure from the simple gameplay mechanic in Angry Birds.

 

When you start a level, you have a number of parts you can use to build a vehicle and a grid of squares where you'll drag the parts to assemble it. In the beginning, you'll only have square building blocks, a couple of wheels, and green pig that will "drive" the contraption. If you build the vehicle correctly, once you hit the check mark button that indicates you're ready to go, your green pig will travel down hills and over jumps to grab the level's star boxes on the way to the map piece. If your contraption falls apart, the pig gets ejected from it, or if you miss a star box along the way, you won't get the perfect three-star score for that level. Like Angry Birds, this mechanic is what has you trying levels again and again, trying to get it just right for the perfect score.

 

As you progress, more items are added to build more-complex vehicles, from the simple two-wheeled contraptions in the beginning to multiple part machines. Later you'll build flying machines and navigate through caves and other obstacles, where your construction means the difference between getting the map piece and a respectable star score or not making it to the end at all.

 

Source: CNET