Heirs to the feathered throne

Rovio’s Angry Birds are launching new free levels every month or so, if not for Seasons, for Rio or the main game. With the addition of the thanksgiving turkey, number of characters has grown to eight, not counting monkeys and green pigs. Five hundred million downloads, hundreds of millions of profit, releases on every known platform, an enviable merchandising strategy including lovely plushes, more than nine million Facebook fans and a ready to everything customer attention service through Twitter make Angry Birds the Holy Grail not only of casual games, but also of all the whole mobile industry. In addition, it’s Finnish, which means –or at least fetches- a right mix of exoticism and know-how.

Seen that way, Angry Birds isn’t a passing craze and has a very long way to go. They themselves are a role model for every starting developer and the competition to beat. How? Why? Is Angry Birds pointing the way to its heir? How could that success be repeated? Can we extrapolate Angry Birds formula to other games? Is there any heir to Angry Birds’ throne waiting around? We’ve gathered three different options to it. Either you are fed up of squaks, cacaws and chirrps or just want to discover three great yet not as well-known alternatives, read on!

Twisted Games’ Beaver’s Revenge could be called “angry beaver” or “furious fun fauna”,  it doesn’t matter. Including better polygonal graphics, furry characters and a mayhem of destruction at every stage, Beaver’s revenge deserves to be mentioned as a natural evolution of Angry Birds. Music maybe isn’t so remixable, but you can select the order in which your animal ammo should be thrown. This game represents the standards case of “yes, it’s better, but it hasn’t been as successful”.  Perhaps regarding to catapult animals to a certain death, it’s by far better to be the first instead of being just better. Check it out by yourself, but don’t blame us when you start making an apology of BR under the banner of “how haven’t you played it yet?” or something similar.

Open Sea! has nothing to do with Angry Birds, neither The Pixelizers with Rovio. Laws of Physics are blatantly omitted; it’s based on a truer story (omg); there’s political incorrectness every other stage and game mechanic is so simple that Angry Birds seems to require a postgraduate course in comparison. This game plays its cards of absolutely fun, gameplay and humor wisely. If there were for sale plush toys of Eve, the Elder and the Drunken follower, believe us, we’ll gladly buy them the same way we bought the birds. And, if there would be a costume contest on Facebook, we’d rather prefer biblical parodies than huge cumbersome foam birds. The only little flaw is that once Jess appears you have to pay a two bucks tithe to continue. Yes, a two bucks fee isn’t too much.

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Wind-up Knight by Robot Invader, symbolizes, in its very own essence, the basics of Angry Birds: it’s free from its very beginning to its latest end; it’s learnable since the first game and its main character –a clockwork hero- is lovely. Spice it with humor and a princess in peril and you’ll have an absolute hit. This game brings back in its own way old feelings from Dragon’s Lair at the same time it has that je ne sais quoi typical of contemporary mobile gaming. If ‘once you start…’ has to be a motto for something, it should be for this game.

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Peter’s genuinely a huge fan of Angry Birds. He’s been looking for a substitute since early symptoms showed off and has had goodness enough to share his research with us all.

Don’t forget to check our other op-ed articles by Ms Grace (here) and Mr. Lund (there) and our editorial in conmemoration of our 2nd anniversary.

Likewise, we’ve just launched the 4th edition of AndroidZoom Cartoon. Take a look at it here.