The Best, The Worst and The Missing

[Orange Bubbles]

@freckledpig147 Nice choices and explanations! I agree with almost everything you said.

About Silver… she’s female and her power needs some practice to get it right, just like Matilda’s (even in this game girls are complicated… hahaha). I find her very useful in many situations.

[monsterpighunter]

@hooksfan I don’t agree terence is quite a powerful bird, can easily knock down a stone building

@freckledpig147, like orange bubbles, I also agree with most of what you said

[hooksfan]

I’ve found Terrence to be pretty much useless against a stone building. I have better luck with the smaller red bird. Can’t count the times I’ve seen Terrence hit a stone building and just bounce back from it.

[Orange Bubbles]

@hooksfan

Every bird has strengths and weaknesses, that’s why we have 7 different birds to use. There is no perfect bird.

Terrence is sometimes weak against stone (it depends largely on the type structure) and VERY weak against balloons (which is ironic) but is still one of the strongest birds of the flock.

You just need to throw him at the right spot (without worrying about the right time to use the special ability… he doesn’t need one) and he can easily wreck an entire stage with multiple structures.

And due to his large size, he’s the one that takes more advantage of the different “gimmicks” in the levels (spitting flowers, fans, portals, bounce pads, etc.).

He’s a depressed, dull and lazy bird, but does his job. :D

PS: I made some changes to the Opening Post. ;)

[hooksfan]

Pretty sure that Bubbles is absent in Angry Birds 2. I will take the Bomb Bird over Terrence any day of the week. I guess I’m just useless since I don’t know what that right spot is…

[werehamsta]

Bomb is undoubtedly the most powerful bird in the flock, but Terrence is #2, IMO. Then there’s Red with his blast ability. Other ones require specific sets of conditions for their power to become relevant.

[Orange Bubbles]

@hooksfan I only mentioned Bubbles as irony, because it’s my favorite bird and yet I don’t consider him perfect. But I’ll remove that to avoid confusion. ;)

[monsterpighunter]

@freckledpig147 I was unable to tell this in my previous post but the blues and red might be worse than silver and balloon pig is the most annoying pig

@hooksfan terence can break stone blocks, just not much but most of the time it’s enough to make the building collapse

[AngryAngers]

Looks like Corporal Pig has been disqualified from all new AB games and other things… Yep. That’s the missing. And the story is sooooooo boring. Boss levels? Y those three just appear every time?! Y they don’t create any constraptions just like ABS and ABSW II?! The gameplay? Also boring. With me, I’m just bored with shooting and shooting and puzzle games. I want more action, just like ABT, and that’s why it’s the best AB game ever in my whole life. But this game, needs more action. Y don’t increase the health and let pigs attack us, just like what ABT do?

[David Martin]

Birds

Best: I agree that it’s the bomb. Obviously it can take down large structures very easily, but it’s also useful for popping nearby pigs and balloons or detonating TNT in situations that would otherwise require multiple birds to hit all of those targets directly. It’s also useful in a pinch when a pig is right behind some sort of indestructible obstacle that makes it impossible to reach with most other birds’ trajectories.

Red gets honorable mention. His new scream ability is one of the most satisfying elements of AB2 to learn to use. It’s ruined me for the older AB games because Red couldn’t do anything special in those (Star Wars aside) and he was generally the most useless bird.

Worst: Chuck seems to be the least versatile bird in this game. Sure, he’s fast, and can reach higher spots than most other birds, but he’s total weak sauce whenever there’s a lot of glass present, and even with wood, I feel like he always gets slowed down more easily than he should. There are just too many levels where I need to be exactly precise with him in order for him to be valuable. Sometimes he’s useful in a pinch when I need to trick one of those annoying laser pigs, but for the most part, when I’ve got one pig left in a location where I could hit him with pretty much any bird, I’ll sacrifice Chuck for that in order to save my more powerful birds for whatever’s coming up on the next screen.

Missing: I was kind of hoping there would be more than one new bird, actually. I’m guessing that with the random generation of levels, they’ve kind of painted themselves into a corner where they can’t introduce too many different birds unless their abilities are adaptable to a lot of different situations, and some of the special bird abilities in other games were only suited to very specific situations in the levels where they appeared.

Pigs

Best: It seems like it’s cheating to pick the golden pig. of course we all like it, but it’s not an enemy and you can pass the level without ever touching it (sometimes you get credit for it, sometimes not, which is weird), so I’m not gonna count it. Out of the actual enemies, I actually think the Magician Pig might be the most satisfying to defeat. Sure, he can be annoying when he keeps zapping over to different spots and forcing you to waste birds, but it sure is awesome when you destroy his escape plan first and then go after him, forcing him to appear in midair or telefrag into a brick. He’s more of a strategic pig to go up against, while a lot of the others come down to hoping you have the right bird or else you’re screwed.

Worst: The purple laser pig. Whatever he’s called. I’ve told this pig exactly what he can go do to his mother more times than I can count. This is where the random aspect of the level generation really frustrates me, because it seems like he appears a lot more lately than he used to, and often he’s in a spot where you have no choice but to fire in his general direction. If I don’t have the Blues or maybe Chuck handy, and I can’t get high enough above the structure he’s on with Matilda, I’m probably going to end up restarting the level, which is a huge bummer thanks to the lives system. The one upside I’ve noticed is that whole he tends to turn my bigger birds into harmless teddy bears or rubber duckies or just zap them out of existence entirely, he’ll often turn one of the Blues into a golden pig. That’s immensely satisfying when one of the other Blues takes him out in the process.

Balloon pig gets the honorable mention here. Yeah, often times he destroys himself and maybe even knocks some other stuff down in the process, but he has a bad habit of starting to puff up just when I’m about to topple the structure he’s standing on. He comes out of nowhere, usually after I’ve already thought of a halfway decent strategy for the screen I’m on. He’s like the game’s way of saying, “We know you did everything right, but we’re gonna make you waste another bird anyway, just for the lolz.”

Missing: I can’t say there’s any pig that I really “miss”, since I’m not a huge fan of the pigs fighting back in general when for me the fun part of the game is figuring out how toe defeat the structures they’re standing on. But I do agree that the bosses could use a little more variety. It wouldn’t even really have to change the gameplay, just throw a couple different costumes on some of ’em.

Spells

Best: Chili Pepper is so much fun. I love that it basically plants a bomb right in the middle of a structure (well, most of the time anyway – of course the game loves to pick the one pig on screen that is completely isolated).

Honorable Mention: I was gonna say Mighty Eagle, which I think is there not so much as a way to score you points but as a measure of last resort when you figure a level is going to cost you too many birds and you care more about passing the level than your score. Getting this early on and saving it for the last screen is immensely satisfying when I can pull it off, though it does tend to lead to a bit of a Sunk Cost fallacy when I think I can clear an earlier stage without it, then I waste a few other birds and I kick myself for not just Eagling it, especially when I find out the final screen was actually easier.

Worst: Snowflake. It doesn’t actually knock anything down, so when you get it randomly instead of a new bird, you’re basically down one bird unless you can take out several ice structures at once with a single bird to make up for it (which is generally when I’ll only have Red or Chuck left, of course). There’s nothing more frustrating than resigning yourself to watch the same 30-second ad for the umpteenth time, hoping that the last bird they assign you will be sufficient to clear the final room, and then they give you this impotent thing instead.

Missing: I just want more variety here. As we get deeper into the game, it would be interesting to have new spells, especially if they were themed to match some of the newer worlds that have been introduced (and it would be OK if they only showed up in those levels).

General

Best: I really like the gameplay overall. Despite my frustrations with limited lives and occasional level configurations that seem downright unwinnable, I tend to go back and replay levels again and again because I never quite know what I’m gonna get, which is unlike the old AB games where once I play them through and 3-star them, I’ll pretty much never come back to them. The ability to pick the order of birds is awesome. Having the dotted path to help you aim is something that should have been standard in all AB games since the beginning.

Worst: The lives system. Everyone hates it. Just admit defeat on this one, Rovio. You really screwed the pooch with this decision. Some of us would have gladly paid a one-time fee to own the game, but we’ll never pay a red cent for new lives or anything else you want to sell us once the game’s already in progress.

Honorable mention goes to false advertising about the devices the game was optimized for. Rovio says it’ll run on the iPod Touch 5th generation. It crashes quite a bit on that device, despite mine being brand new when I first downloaded the game. (I reported this only to find out that they really optimized it with a specific iOS in mind, not the specific device – which is fine, but then say that’s what it’s optimized for.) Making matters worse, the game has a bad habit of not remembering what I did right before it crashed (which is infuriating when I’ve just finished an arena run, or worse still, just replenished my lives – it’ll remember that I spent the gems but not that I gained the lives!) The crashes almost always happen after viewing an ad, so I can only conclude that the ads themselves are the memory hog. I don’t mind watching them from time to time, but maybe provide lower-bandwidth versions of these for older devices.

Another honorable mention goes to any boss level where you need like 5 pigs to clear the debris just to get the boss off of a platform, only to knock him onto another platform with even more of it around him. That’s not strategic, it’s just plain irritating. Make the challenges actually fun, people.

Missing: We need more ways to earn feathers. They just don’t show up often enough, and there’s plenty of room to level up based on what I’ve seen so far. I also think it would be better if we could still earn bonus points for unused birds/cards at the end of a level, and/or keep unused spells (even if they were randomly awarded mid-level) for future levels.

Oh, and the constant game crashes due to needing to load the menu after every level? Might happen a lot less if you just have me a “Next Level” option that would skip the menu and just go sequentially to the next level, since 9 times out of 10 that’s what I want to do after beating a level anyway.

[Orange Bubbles]

Great answers @david-martin and welcome to the site!

I agree with almost everything you said.

Looks like you’re already a veteran in this game!

[CDRGuy]

General Complaints
This game is too battery intense. Playing for 20 minutes will drain my iPhone5S by about 20%, and the phone back gets HOT. The game is not mobile friendly — it takes too much memory and battery. Besides, the levels are too long. I liked being able to complete an ABO level in 30-45 seconds. Now, it’s like 5 minutes (even more once I wait for it to boot up), which makes it less likely I’ll start playing.

Other gripes: Level 319 — a little pig can get in an infinite loop of slime/launch, and then becomes almost impossible to pop (try popping a fast moving pig). I would wish that each landing did some damage so that the pigs would pop. I’ve also had the auto timeout be too fast — just as a structure collapsed on the last pig, I get the “Level Failed” box. Lastly, when zoomed out, tapping the screen often doesn’t work to activate bird abilities. I can’t count the number of times Matilda failed to drop her egg. Finally, like others have mentioned, a way is needed to move faster between episodes.

I’m not a fan of the auto-generated levels. Too much repetition. Furthermore, many levels are best beaten with a certain bird, and if your deck is wrong or you mis-hit a shot, you can be stuck.