Bad Piggies Reviews: Is Rovio's Angry Birds Sequel Any Good?

REVIEW: Is Rovio's 'Angry Birds' Sequel 'Bad Piggies' Any Good?
Rovio

If you're an Angry Birds fan who spent countless hours on the commute trying to destroy pigs for no very good reason, there's a good chance you're going to want to check out Finnish developer Rovio's new title.

(Even if you have to play as the same pigs you've spent two years attacking.)

Bad Piggies is released on iOS and Android on Thursday, and switches perspective to the Petulant Porcines.

In each level of the game you're presented with a toolbox of crates, wheels, motors and balloons, and have to construct a craft capable of travelling through the level to the finish.

Once you've made your craft you hit play - and wait to see whether you've made it. If it crashes - try again, this time adding another balloon, wheel or motor to get things moving.

Luckily for us, we're among the publications how've managed to have a look ahead of its release - and frankly, it's a bit of a blast.

Bad Piggies:HuffPost UK Review

If you secretly sleep next to an Angry Birds teddy bear, Bad Piggies feels like home. The game does a great job of reminding you of Angry Birds in look and feel, while at the same time presenting an entirely new gaming experience.

Everything from the in-game building materials, the three-star grading system, the menus and the loveable sense of humour are in the new game - while the same addictive quality means you're going to be tearing through stage after stage quicker than you'll even realise.

What it lacks, though, is the same physical sense of fun as Rovio's original hit title. Angry Birds' slingshot mechanism was universal, obvious and tactile. For all the polish and creativity of the new game's build-it-and-see mechanic, it's hard to replicate that same combination of timing and tactics that made Angry Birds such a hit.

Similarly, it's hard to see how Bad Piggies will have the same appeal to young kids as Angry Birds did. And we mean young kids - we knew three and four year olds who loved the original like we used to love Mario, and we have a feeling this new game might be pitched a bit above their heads. No pun intended.

Don't get us wrong, through. Bad Piggies has a great shot at being a hit (and the iOS App Store could use one right now). We're just not sure it possesses the same intangible magic that took Angry Birds from being just a game and turned it into a soft toy-selling, theme park-building mega-buster-ganza.

What did everyone else think? Here's a few quotes from the best reviews from around the web.

PocketGamer: Playful and Creative (8/10)

"It's playful and creative, even inside the quite restrictive boundaries of each level. You get to try out ridiculous ideas, and flash an ear-to-ear grin when your madcap plans actually work. Bad Piggies is a bit like the best physics lesson you had school, but on every day of the year and with no theory in between... It's better than Angry Birds."

Guardian: Fun - But Very Difficult (8/10)

"Bad Piggies requires more skill [than Angry Birds] so should please more-hardcore gamers. But it runs a very real risk of frustrating more casual players... Bad Piggies felt harder going: I switched off the iPad in a temper a few times when stuck."

The Verge: Anger Management (7/10)

"On one hand, the game is too open, allowing the pig and his craft to get stuck in some distant cranny, requiring the player to manually restart the stage. On the other hand, the game isn't open enough, with many stages solvable only by creating a specific ship. Worse, it's construction set, at first, doesn't promote creativity. A ship is either built correctly, and it does it's job, or it isn't built correctly, and it flops about like a fish out of water or floats off to Oz."

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