It’s got to be hard not to love Angry Birds. It’s cute, intensely addictive and a hell of a lot of fun, in a sadistic pig killing sort of way and Angry Birds Star Wars 2 is yet another excellent addition to what’s turning into a good sized series. There’s lots of new levels to take on, an impressive number of new characters to hurl into battle and the new dimension of Dark Side, or Pork Side as it’s known in the world of Angry Birds, is a master stroke of genius to ensure the game wasn’t just a simple rehash of their existing games.
Our only complaint is that it feels like it might have been released a little too soon after the first Angry Birds Star Wars installment, which was only released by the game’s developers, Rovio, just shy of a year ago at the end of 2012. While that doesn’t necessarily take too much away from the quality of the new installment, it does mean that you’ll be a bit torn between really getting into II or being dedicated to 100% completion of I.
Story
It’s a bit of a tenuous link between the egg-stealing antics that normally dominate proceedings in Angry Birds games and the galaxy saving plot of the Star Wars movie series, but that’s exactly what happens with the Force firing spin off. Following on from last year’s hit, the new game focuses on the more recent Star Wars films, so you start out on Naboo as in The Phantom Menace and progress through Episodes I, II and III brilliantly taking in Tatooine and the rest of the movie locations.
It may sound like an odd combination, but it’s one that has injected even more cool into the Angry Birds Series and it works well from both perspectives. The big new addition though is that as well as getting to run through things from the lighter shading of the spectrum you also get to see it from the Pork Side.
Gameplay
Angry Birds Star Wars 2 follows the same simple, but effective gameplay structure of all of the previous releases in the series, with you hurling birds with a sling shot at birds in various landscape settings. The great thing about the Star Wars incarnation is that each of the birds correlate to the characters from the movies with accompanying moves. For example Qui-Gon Jinn whips out a light sabre attack, Obi-Wan Kenobe fires a blast of force, Yoda does a spinning light sabre flip of fury and Jar Jar Binks has a grappling hook move.
However, all of this is added to with the prospect of the Pork Side, which flips everything on its head and allows you to fire the darker, pig-infused characters from the movies at the unsuspecting bird rebels. You’ll start out with Jango Fett and his rocket launcher, but he’s soon added to by the Emporer, Darth Sidious and his force lightning of fury, fire blasting Pig Troopers and Darth Maul and his spinning double light sabre of doom.
The gameplay is always going to be addictive with Angry Birds games, but the progression through the movie story and the sheer fun of taking on a vast range of characters with their own very cool moves makes it even more intense. The addition of the Pork Side element of the game takes it up to the next level providing a bit of justification for the relative quick secession in the series.
Graphics
The graphics look like the best we’ve seen from Rovio with an epic loading screen, swish Coruscant inspired title page and more importantly very cool Star Wars backdrops and levels to fly through. The detail in the background artwork is very true to the visuals of the movies with great sand dune on Tatooine and lush waterfalls on Naboo.
Each of the characters are animated well with the cute blend between Angry Birds and Star Wars styles. Young Anakin’s speeder move is a work of genius and the close up shot of Sabulba when you don’t finish him off is worth throwing the odd one of two levels for.
Review summary
While we love Angry Birds Star Wars 2 a lot, we could have done with a few more months to finish off the first Force flying game 100%. We haven’t tried out the feature that lets you buy characters and insert them into the game similar to Skylanders, but we can’t really imagine it making the game any better than it is. The best 69p we’ve spent this year.
Angry Birds Star Wars 2 review: 4.8/5
