Quick review: Angry Birds Space, the best in the series

The Angry Birds are back, and so are their enemies, the green pigs! The birds have taken flight into outer space, but that still isn’t enough to avoid the pigs, who use spaceships to steal the Angry Bird’s eggs. You know the drill by now. It’s time to deal some payback, but with astrophysics!

I’ve been playing Angry Birds Space for about an hour now, and I am thoroughly impressed. In fact I think this is the best version of Angry Birds that Rovio has ever released.

What’s New?

As you’ll soon see if you give ABS a try, the physics of the game have been entirely done over. There are two types of “space”, best described as open space and gravity-wells (represented by blue rings). When you sling a bird into dark open space, no gravity will act upon it, and any objects it collides with will inherit part of the bird’s momentum. This is useful when you have to knock objects floating in space into gravity wells, to get to the pigs. Gravity wells have a strong gravitational pull, which affects the birds as soon as they enter the ring.

If you fire a bird into a ring at the right angle and with enough momentum, the bird will orbit eccentrically for a few moments before coming down to crash. Some levels involve playing around with gravity, whilst others take place in frictionless space. Needless to say, causing chain reactions of explosions that send rocks flying in all directions is tremendous fun.

Another nice touch that I like is the fact that there is no fixed “direction” the bird has to travel in. From the perspective of a gamer, you can fly around a planet clockwise or anti-clockwise, and sometimes use gravity briefly, to slingshot yourself into another gravity well, and then another, until you hit your target.

The developers of Angry Birds Space have added something never before seen in their games, which is a trajectory indicator, represented by a dotted line showing the path the Angry Bird will take. This helps you line up for a perfect shot at the pigs, and doesn’t spoil the game in any way as I first suspected. If anything, it serves to make things better.

Give It A Go

This edition of Angry Birds comes with three chapters, ‘Pig Bang’, ‘Cold Cuts’, and ‘Eggsteroids’. There is also a planet marked ‘coming soon’, so Rovio will probably be releasing additional content in the future. But, for now, there are plenty of levels to keep you occupied and distracted from whatever work you are supposed to be doing.

I encourage you to download Angry Birds Space for free and try it out! It’s a great addition to the Angry Birds games family, and I’m sure it will become the number one game in the Play Store within a few days.