“Join Red, Chuck, Bomb and the Blues to save the stolen eggs,” reads the official blurb for Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs. However, that’s not the real story here. No, this is clearly a game about a wrathful god striking down the greedy right-wing pigs who are selfishly hoarding the wealth of an island and blaming it all on the poor birds who just want everyone to live a good life.
Well, the birds have summoned you, a towering deity with an almighty slingshot, to yeet them into the very pigs that they’re fighting against. No more will the fat, ignorant, pigs have the run of the land! Now is the time for revolution! It is your divine right to smite the ignorant and selfish, to progress through each zone in turn and take it back for the people birds!
Look, it’s just Angry Birds in VR. You shoot a variety of birds into the structures, using their different abilities to smash into structures supporting the green pigs, destroy them all and score as many points as possible. The difference in VR is the perspective, which has you launching them in first-person, and which changes things up quite a bit.
Rather than having a static view of the structures, you can move your head around and even teleport to different vantage points. This, combined with the fact that the structures are three-dimensional, allows for some more intricate level design. Let’s say that you’re really struggling with a level; you’ve been firing your birds off at the supporting structures, but nothing seems to work. More often than not, the right answer is to simply look around a bit, duck down or teleport to a different spot to explore the level. You’ll usually be able to find a supporting beam or a box of TNT that you couldn’t see before and target the weak spot.
It’s a neat little twist that completely revitalises the series and adds more (this pun is intended) depth. It’s better because it’s no longer so one-dimensional. Plus, and perhaps most importantly for this review, it feeds in excellently when designing your own levels. Which is what the latest update to the game allows you to do.
Due to the way levels in Angry Birds VR are constructed, you can easily look at them and imagine making your own. Simply stacking boxes and planting cleverly hidden kill switches should be a lot of fun… and it is! Not only that, but it’s also incredibly easy to do thanks to the intuitive motion controllers. You just grab the piece you want and place it where you want it, rotating the world however you like to get the perfect angle and placement. Then it’s just a matter of planting the pigs in place and choosing which birds you want to be available.
Level editors are often a great way to increase the potential lifespan of a game, but they can also be a bit finicky and hard to use. The advantage of VR is that you can properly immerse yourself in the level. Angry Birds VR pulls it off brilliantly and it really does improve the game exponentially. It’s just a shame there isn’t some kind of online library for the new levels, as that would have done even more for the game. Since the level editor was added in an update, maybe there will be in the future?
TSBonyman
I watched someone play through the campaign in short order on YT, looks to be better value with the level editor now though.