Rovio Classics: Angry Birds

Circa 2012, I had purchased every Angry Birds game to date. I loved the series, and only really fell off after Angry Birds Star Wars II. Since then, every single mainline game I loved so much has been delisted, but only after being stuffed with ads and micro-transactions. I, like many other classic Angry Birds fans, longed for a return to form, and Rovio finally obliged in 2022 with a full remake of the original game as it was in 2012, before any of the money-hungry updates. It turns out that those updates happened for a reason, as Rovio Classics: Angry Birds was delisted from the Play Store less than a year after its release with Rovio citing a major loss of revenue in all of its other Angry Birds titles due to the remake's popularity. Thankfully, like half of the original games, I bought this one on release day, so I still have access to it.

For someone as familiar with the modern mobile gaming landscape as I am, a return to classic Angry Birds was a breath of fresh air. Off the top of my head, this is the only time I can think of a mobile game getting remade, and it's the perfect kind of remake too. It looks just how I remember the original, while being greatly improved to match modern graphical standards. In addition to the appearance, the gameplay is recreated perfectly. As far as I could tell, every bird functioned how they did in the original with accurate physics to match.

When it comes to actually playing Angry Birds though, I'm not as big of a fan as I make myself out to be. It's always a little fun to open up the game and beat a few levels, but I'll inevitably get stuck on one for long enough that I lose my motivation and switch to doing something else. I never stayed away too long, but I wouldn't call myself a very dedicated player. I typically had the most fun with the game when I could play it alongside my dad.

My dad is a recovered Angry Birds fanatic. He used to be able to play the games for hours, always earning all three stars when he beat a level. I have no compulsion to try to hit three stars when I play, so when I introduced my dad to this remake, he immediately wanted to help me correct all of my imperfect completions. When we played together, we would try a level and then pass the phone, learning from each other's experiments and mistakes to eventually get three stars in a bunch of levels together. When I play on my own, I usually try the same strategy over and over, hoping to execute it better the next time around. When playing with my dad, we bounce off of each other's ideas and rarely repeat the same approach more than once or twice, making the game a lot more fun, in my opinion. I know not everybody has somebody to play the game with, and it's still fun on your own, but I enjoy Angry Birds the most when playing in a team.

Playing together or solo, it's clear even today why this game was so popular. I'm pretty frustrated that it was delisted from Google Play, as I can't recommend many people try it out, but I had a good enough time with it anyways. If you have an Apple device, you still have a chance to give this excellent remake a shot, so maybe consider doing so before it's removed there too.

The game is available for iOS here (as of 5/18/24): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reds-first-flight/id1596736236

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