Angry Birds Transformers (mobile game)
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| 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) and Chuck (with the powers of Bumblebee) free. The two head 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!)
Block types include:
- Glass 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 wide range, sending blocks flying
- Coin Blocks: Golden blocks that spit out Coins with every hit. Pretty dang sturdy
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. 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 taken out of the game for a time, but they will eventually return. While 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, which also takes them out of the game for a while, but not as long as defeat does. This time-out is in real-time, even when the game is off, but you can spend earned Crystals or scan a figure with a Telepod to make the repairs instantaneous.
Cleared stages will slowly earn Coins over real-time. Tapping on the Coins on the map adds them to your bank. There are also occasional treasure chests on the map, tap them to earn more Crystals. 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 speed up their work (at the cost of Crystals). This too goes on in real-time. Once a stage is re-cyberformed, it can be played again.
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, as well as an unlockable secondary move (which must be fueled first by blasting a cyberformed piece of scenery to return it to normal, which is not always as easy as it sounds). Working out the strengths and weaknesses of each character is key to high scores, and in some cases simple survival. (See each characters' individual page for a breakdown of their abilities.)
New characters can be added to your roster in two different ways. In-game, each character is held captive in a block of ice, 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.
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 Crystals; 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 by spending Coins, 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 Crystals to make the upgrade happen instantly; the closer the upgrades are to complete, the less Crystals you need to spend. Upgrading characters is vital as the levels get harder and harder. You can only have one character undergoing upgrades at a time, though, which tempts you to spend those Crystals....
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 with a slo-mo that does heavy damage to most of the Glass blocks and Piggies on-screen. However, there's a limit to when you are able to call in a partner; once you see your transport 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 Crystal 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.
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 chosing 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. And of course, sometimes ads will just pop up anyway.
Spending real monies allows you to buy large numbers of Crystals, 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.
Of course, you can get the same repair/upgrade speed-up effects with a Telepod-activated figure... which also costs real monies. And Rovio doesn't believe in cloud saves, so depending on who you ask, (this wiki editor wouldn't know, so someone please confirm), the Telepods have to be re-scanned every time you exit the game completely and want to use them, because the app "forgets" if you close it. But this also means that, according to many reviewers, if you have 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.
Featured characters
| Autobirds | Deceptihogs |
|---|---|
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Energon 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 die the player doesn't get anything.
Notes
- For reasons unknown, Energon Galvatron is the only playable character without a corresponding Telepods toy.
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:
- "Crowning Grimlock"
- "Rhyming with Wheelie"
- "Targeting 2006"
- "Seeing if we've got The Touch"
- "Dueling on dams"
- "Rebuilding Guardian"
- "Hailing Megatron"
- "Pouring water on scraplets"
- "Practicing Metallikato"
- "Crashing the Ark"
- "Rebooting Teletraan 1"
- "Spying on Soundwave"
- "Having a taste of our own electro-medicine"
- The music for the game was composed by Vince DiCola, who did the score for The Transformers: The Movie.
- Each character has one or two unique wearable accessories, many of which are based on wider Transformers lore:
- Optimus Prime: the Matrix of Leadership and movie Optimus Prime's Energon Sword.
- Bumblebee: Rescue Bots Bumblebee's Energize jackhammer tool.
- Soundwave: Laserbeak.
- Bludgeon: Generation 1 Bludgeon's tank-turret gun.
- Heatwave: Rescue Bots Heatwave's Energize fire axe.
- Lockdown: Age of Extinction Lockdown's hook and head-gun.
- Ultra Magnus: Generation 1 Ultra Magnus's shoulder-mounted rocket launcher.
- Galvatron: Energon Galvatron's sword.
- Soundblaster: A "Deceptihogs" cassette tape, vaguely emulating Generation 1 Soundblaster's toy's dual cassette capacity.
- Thundercracker: Arms Micron Balo in shield mode.
- Jazz: Fall of Cybertron Jazz's grappling hook.
- Brawl: Generation 1 Brawl's twin sonic cannon and one of movie Brawl's missile pods (specifically based on his Fast Action Battlers toy, of all things).
- Grey Slam Grimlock: Generation 1 Grimlock's crown.
- Energon Starscream: Generation 1 Starscream's crown from The Transformers: The Movie.
- Energon Soundwave: Ratbat.
- Energon Lockdown: An Energon cube and Age of Extinction Lockdown's shoulder missiles.
- Energon Galvatron: A miniature Unicron.
- Energon Optimus Prime: the "Eggspark".
- Ultimate Megatron: Generation 1 Megatron's Energon mace.
- Ultimate Optimus Prime: Powermaster Optimus Prime's shoulder cannons.
- Goldbite Grimlock: Wheelie riding on his back.
External links
