Angry Birds Transformers (mobile game)

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Angry Birds Transformers
Angry Birds Transformers

It's happening.
Developer Rovio
Publisher Rovio Mobile
Platforms Apple iOS 7+ (iPad, iPhone)
Android
Release date October 15, 2014 (iOS)
October 30, 2014 (Android)

Angry Birds Transformers is a mobile app for both iPhone and Android platforms developed and published by Rovio. It is a themed version of the developer's mega-popular mobile game Angry Birds.


Synopsis

The Allspark Egg has landed on Piggy Island, transforming its dueling inhabitants and giving them bodies and powers based on the Transformers: the birds of the Flock become Autobirds and the Bad Piggies the Deceptihogs. The two sides briefly continue their struggle with these new powers until they are both threatened by another transformed group, the Eggbots, who seek to transform all of Piggy Island into metal, backed by countless robotized Minion Pigs.

Most of the Autobirds and all of the Deceptihogs are captured leaving only Red (who has the powers of Optimus Prime) free. The leader of the Flock (you know him well) heads out to free the Autobirds and Deceptihogs, because only by joining forces can they restore Piggy Island to normal!

Gameplay

The game is a deviation from the normal Angry Birds formula, but the core goal, toppling block towers to pop the Bad Piggies on them, is the same.

Once you select an available stage from the map of Piggie Island, your chosen character runs along the foreground at a set speed, as block towers scroll by in the background. By tapping the screen, your character takes aim and fires their weapon. The trick is to quickly determine which blocks in the structure are best to destroy/shove to cause a domino effect, toppling them and popping the Piggies by dropping blocks on them or making them fall far enough. (Remember, weaker blocks are not always the best target!) You can also attack the Piggies directly; in fact, some characters specialize in this more direct approach!

Block types include:

  • Glass (or Ice, according to other sources) Blocks: Very weak, easily shattered
  • Wood Blocks: Fairly sturdy but not hard to break
  • Stone Blocks: Very durable, better for pushing than breaking
  • TNT Blocks: Easily-broken red crates that explode with a considerable radius, sending blocks flying
  • Coin Blocks: Golden blocks that spit out Coins with every hit. Pretty dang sturdy, but if you destroy them, you earned a lot of Coins.

Each stage is also littered with cyberformed scenery with blinky lights that can be blasted to revert it to normal. Doing so sends an Energon cube hurtling towards the character. If the character is accompanied by an Energonicon, the cube is used to fuel its special power, activated by tapping the icon. A full Energonicon cannot make use of extra cubes, so timely tapping to spend the energy before obtaining more is key. As your characters level up, they can store more Energon cubes, up to three, which generally extend the duration of the Energonicon's effects.

Most areas also have random destructible elements that can be blasted. The more destruction you cause, the more Coins you get to buy upgrades and explore new areas. Each level has a set length; you do not have to pop every Piggie to pass, merely survive to the end.

"Survive"? Yeah. Some Piggies are weaponized and will begin to attack shortly after appearing on-screen, even before you can retaliate. Thus, popping these Piggies (or at least upending them to throw off their aim) quickly becomes essential. You can also try to escape attacks and falling giant stone statues by transforming to vehicle mode. This speeds you along a bit, but removes your ability to attack, plus you can only maintain vehicle mode for a limited time. Attacking automatically transforms you back to robot mode. There are other obstacles that can decrease a character's health bar; lose all your life and the character is picked up by Astrotrain; you can then spend some Gems to immadiately put them back into the fight, or let the timer run out and quit the level. If you quit, you will not earn Piggie points for the level, you do keep any Coins you collected. Health does not restore between levels, so if a character is low you must spend Coins to repair them. This takes them out of the game for a while, in real-time, even when the game is off. You can then repair them instantly by spending Gems, but there are other repair methods as well. You can repair any character to full health instantly by watching an ad (up to 30 seconds long) or scanning their transformable figure (if they have one) with a Telepod.

New stages are unlocked by leveling up your characters, increasing your Rank one point with every level-up. Every 5 or 10 Rank settings lets you clear the clouds away from a new area of Piggy Island.

Cleared stages will slowly earn Coins over real-time. Tapping on the Coins on the map adds them to your bank. After a set point they will not accrue anymore: this threshold is about four hours of real time, yielding 560 Coins per freed area. There are also randomly spawning treasure chests on the map, tap them to earn various amounts of Gems. However, roaming Eggbots will re-cyberform cleared stages, which removes their Coin bonuses. You can see which stages they are working on, how long the cyberforming process will take, and even interrupt their work (at the cost of Gems), giving you the chance to pelt an Eggbot in-level for extra Coins. Cyberforming too goes on in real-time. Once a stage is re-cyberformed, it can be played again. Note that merely peeking at an in-development will not automatically charge you Gems; you still have a choice to intercept or not.

If you don't want to complete a stage due to it being extremely hard or frustrating, players can use the Skywarp Airfield to have Skywarp Pig attack and remove the stage while still rewarding them with Coins and popped pigs. You can only do this three times, and it costs Gems (3 the first time, 7 the second time, and 15 the third time).

Character choices

Every stage has a pre-set character you control, based on who you've rescued so far. Every character has a different style of attack, movement speed, and armor rating. Working out the strengths and weaknesses of each character is key to high scores, and in some cases simple survival.

New characters can be added to your roster in two different ways. In-game, most characters are held captive in a block of ice on the map, one per area, and you must "spend" a specific number of popped Piggies to break them out. You then have to play a short level with that character, and if they make it to the end, they're yours to keep. If not, they are re-frozen, but thankfully you can try again without having to spend all those hard-earned Piggy points again. Special characters Arcee, Airachnid, Prowl, and Bluestreak are earned through Space Bridge Missions.

Out-of-game, this is where you spend actual-factual money, on the tie-in toys. By placing one of the figures on a Telepod and placing that on your device's camera lens, the game reads the code on the figure and inserts it into the game for a limited amount of time (roughly 6 hours). Some variant characters can only be obtained via Telepod. While the characters unlocked this way are only available temporarily until unlocked via Piggie points, there is no limit on how often you can scan the figure, plus any upgrade progress is saved. You can also use this method to power-up already-unlocked characters before a stage or speed up their repairs without spending Gems; again there is no limit to the number of times you can scan (but the effects will not stack).

Every character can be upgraded multiple times (maximum level for characters is 15) by spending Coins and Materials, which (of course) takes them out of play for a while. Each upgrade is pre-set, increasing attack strength, armor strength, or vehicle mode duration. At certain levels, new abilities are unlocked. You can spend much-rarer Gems to make the upgrade happen instantly; the closer the upgrades are to complete, the fewer Gems you need to spend. Upgrading characters is vital as the levels get harder and harder, not to mention in the phone version you can only unlock new areas with an overall player level, which is raised by upgrading your characters. This isn't the case in the tablet version where you can spend Gold Coins to unlock new areas. You can only have one character undergoing a Level Up at a time.

Characters can also be upgraded via "Customize", adding accessories bought with Gems (or Tokens, see "Daily Challenges" below) to alter their appearance, boost stats, or imbue special abilities. One accessory can be placed on a character's head, face, chest, arms and back. Accessories are character-specific, so see each page for more detailed information.

Soon you get the option to have a second character on standby, who you can call in and have the computer control for a brief period. They enter the stage in slow motion with a massive shockwave that does heavy damage to most everything on-screen. However, there's a limit to when you are able to call in a partner; once you see Astrotrain fly overhead, your partner's no longer available. On the other hand, the stage is close to over! But if your partner is already out when you hit that checkpoint, then they will stay active until the very end of the level, nice for really piling on the destruction.

You get to see your partner before you start the stage, and if you don't like that character choice, you can change it by spending some Coins. Partners are either randomly generated, or pulled from the character rosters of your friends if you've connected to the game via Facebook or Google+ or iTunes or whatever the social network stuff the kids are into these days is. If you called on them in the level, you can "thank" them afterward. Doing so gives the other player a nominal reward (either a Gem or 25 Coins), while not thanking them simply tells the other player that while you're grateful for the firepower assist, you don't think they deserve any actual compensation. You jerk. However this seems to be only for your friends if you use the social network support. When you don't have friends or don't believe in social media, you get random users to help, and if people use your characters and you're not friends with them via social network you don't get any rewards if they thank you.

Materials

Materials are special items earned by successfully completing stages (and other tasks), stored in the Silo. These are used to create Energonicons (and other prizes) at Professor Pig's lab, and to upgrade your characters.

The amount of Materials you can store is dictated by the level of the Silo. The Silo can be upgraded using Coins and Materials, which not only lets you store larger numbers and higher levels of Materials, but increases the number and rarity of Materials rewarded upon stage completion. Any Materials won that exceed the Silo's capacity are lost. The Silo's maximum level is 15.

Material types include:

Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
Level 4

Space Bridge Missions

In addition to the stages, there are Space Bridge Missions that your freed characters can complete in order to earn Materials, Coins, Gems, popped pigs, or even new characters (Arcee, Airachnid, Prowl, and Bluestreak). There are three difficulty Space Bridges —Easy, Medium, and Hard— progressively unlocked by clearing more of the map of clouds. Missions are played by selecting one to three characters (for more than one character per mission, you have to spend Gems), that match up with the mission's category. The types of missions have either a light bulb icon (intelligence), a magnifying glass icon (investigation), or a missile icon (firepower) which helps the player determine which character would be most suited for completing the mission. The higher the level your character is at, the more chances it has of getting a better score. Characters who are taking part in missions are unable to be played in the stages until the mission timer runs out. When selecting a mission, you are able to use popped pigs as "pig reinforcements" to lower the mission timer. When the mission is completed, the result screen shows how many keys have been unlocked, which help unlock prizes. The more characters assigned to the mission, the more keys you unlock (you also have the option to watch an ad to earn one additional key). The way prizes are earned is that the five items are placed in presents which spin around the screen, forcing the player to randomly select a present and hope for the best. If you don't have enough keys to unlock the remaining prizes, you can spend Gems to collect the remaining presents (10 for Easy, 20 for Medium, and 30 for Hard).

Challenge Events

During certain periods, Challenge Events pop up for several days (requiring a sign in to Google+ or whatever), pitting players against 19 randomly-selected others in a race to tally the most points within 24 hours by destroying as many of a specific object or enemy as possible. Players can send any available character, accompanied only by an Energonicon, into a randomly-chosen stage to do some damage. Entering a Challenge stage takes one "battery" of energy from the Challenge selection; the player starts with four, and spent batteries will recharge after an hour, one at a time. Of course you can spend Gems to speed up the process and instantly go back to four full batteries, and the more often you recharge per day, the higher the Gem cost.

Challenges are rewarded with Tokens, earned by reaching certain target milestones, and according to your rank at the end of the 24-hour period. These Tokens carry over from prior days' challenges up until the end of the promotion, and can be spent on prizes, including Coins, Accessories, and even new characters. The "redundant" Accessories are often less costly to obtain in Challenges than via normal Gem purchase.

Past Challenge Events
  • Halloween Competition
  • Thanksgiving Challenge
  • Holiday Challenges!
  • Challenge in C-Minor (January 24 ~ January 31, 2016)
Obtain Accessories for Soundwave, Energon Soundwave and Soundblaster, with exclusive Rumble Soundwave Accessory. Had a brief encore run as well.
  • Chinese New Year (Feb 6 ~Feb 16, 2016)
China-themed objects litter the battlefield, and destroying them earns Tokens. Prizes are China-themed accessories for various characters, including dragon hats for the various Grimlocks, and the exclusive character Epic Optimus Prime.
  • Enter the Silverbird (Mar 12~Mar 19, 2016)
Boss Pig's head has been commandeered by the Eggbots and equipped with instant-K.O. missiles. Blasting Boss Pig and flying Pigs earns points for Tokens. Prizes are various prior-existing accessories, with the new Autobird Silver as Windblade as the ultimate prize.
Pop as many Pigs as possible! Each day a new sub-set of Pig (balloon-head, flyers, etc) are worth 10 points a pop instead of the usual 1. All of the prizes are accessories for Lockdown and Energon Lockdown, including the event-exclusive Cannon and Rangefinder for regular Lockdown.
  • Target: 2016 (May 7 ~ May 15, 2016)

This event brings some significant new changes: players can now take two transformers instead of an energonicon, and points are gained only through energon cubes (10 poimts per cube) and priority targets. Using a character from the currently shown bonus squad will increase your points at the end of a stage by the shown percentage, which could be 25% ,50%, 75%, 100%, or even 150%, depending on the squad. Bonus Squads are changed every four hours. As for the prizes, Shockwave was available again for those who may have missed him the first time around, along with a handful of non-exclusive accessories for the Target: 2006 squad (Ultra Magnus, Galvatron, Jazz).

  • The Angry Birds Movie (May 18 ~ May 29, 2016)

Tying in with Rovio's theatrical film, The Angry Birds Movie, this game (along with all the other current Rovio games) promotes the release of the big blockbuster with a new Movie-themed app icon, loading screen, smashables, and event. Points are gained the same way as the previous event. (with Billy Signs and movie tickets as occasional priority targets). Prizes are coconut helmets for Autobirds, cowboy hats for Deceptihogs, and a second chance at Epic Optimus and two exclusive accessories.

  • Heatwave (June 4 ~ June 12, 2016)

There are some small changes for this event: two bonus squad characters are required to get the full point boost. For example, using one seeker will only give a 37% bonus, while using both seekers will give the full 75% bonus. Point values are now 1 per popped pig, 5 per Mortar Tower, and varied for priority targets. The prizes are Heatwave's Ramhorn, Eject, and axe accessories. Tokens can also be exchanged for gems that would be normally in-app purchaces.

Ads and upsells

It's a free game, so how does Rovio make its money? By copious amounts of ads (largely for other games) and by enticing you to spend real currency on in-game currency.

The ads can actually have a gameplay effect, in a disturbingly clever move. After completing a stage, you are given the option to watch a short video ad; doing so doubles your end-of-stage rewards. When choosing a partner for a stage, you will also get a prompt to watch an ad; doing so gives your partner a one-stage stat boost and ups the amount of time they can stay in-play. However, you can only watch so many ads within a set amount of time, so choose which bonuses you go for wisely. You can also watch an ad to repair a character instantly; there does not appear to be any limit on this tactic. And of course, the chance to watch ads may pop up anyway with some extra rewards, such as an extra Material when looking at the Silo.

Spending real monies allows you to buy large numbers of Gems, which are used to speed up character upgrades, repairs, and re-opening stages. Given that those can take from minutes or literal hours to over a day to finish, leaving you with no stages available to play til the required characters are back in commission, it gets tempting to drop some coin of the real variety. Gem packages range from 150 for $4.49 US to 5200 for $89.99 which what the hell who even spends that much money on these things?! And considering that mere accessories, can run up to 1000 crystals, with most of the "buddy character" ones in the 850 range? Yeesh.

Of course, you can get the same repair/upgrade speed-up effects with a Telepod-activated figure... which also costs real monies. And Rovio didn't explicitly mention that the game can be cloud saved on a Facebook account until much later, so depending on who you ask, this means that, according to many reviewers, if you had to do a wipe or ever lose your files for some reason, you can lose all your progress. People have gotten their characters leveled up to the max. Which costs hundreds of thousands of gold coins or thousands of gems (read: lots and lots of grinding or real monies) only for it to be all for nought. You can alter a device's time to make the upgrades go faster, although if you go too far or revert to current time, an error message saying something along the lines of "Error! Time travel detected! Your characters have suffered." and you'll be slapped on the wrist by getting them downgraded in relation to how far away from real time you were.

Autobirds Deceptihogs Others
  • Hal as:
    • Grimlock
    • Grey Slam Grimlock
    • Energon Grimlock
    • Goldbite Grimlock

Accessories


Accessories

* Currently-unplayable characters found in the game files.

"Energon" versions of characters take a bit more damage from attacks than their non-Energon counterparts (and non-Energon characters in general), but they are the only ones who can heal using Energon Cubes; receiving one adds back parts of a heart AND fills up the meter for the Energon weapon. The Ultimate characters (Ultimate Prime and Megatron, along with High Octane Bumblebee and Goldbite Grimlock) get an automatic 2x bonus to their coins at the end of the match, but if they are defeated the player doesn't get anything.

Notes

  • Although Airachnid uses Deceptihog materials to upgrade, the game makes her a member of the Autobirds; additionally, she gains Autobird upgrade materials in stages, and cheers Autobird partners while mocking Deceptihog ones.

References

This game is loaded with tiny jokes and references to Transformers lore.

  • The character designs pull from a broad mix of generations. While (obviously) Generation 1 gets the most representation, there are also elements from the live-action movies, Rescue Bots and War for Cybertron. (See individual character pages for the rundown on each.)
  • The initial loading screen has numerous nods to more specific (and occasionally obscure) bits of Transformers lore:
  • The music for the game was composed by Vince DiCola, who did the score for The Transformers: The Movie.
  • The building for friend activity resembles Fortress Maximus's city mode.
  • Each character has a number of wearable accessories, many of which are based on wider Transformers lore:




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