Angry Birds – An Informed Review

Angry Birds is a game about insane birds that I have never played. Why are the birds angry? I don’t know. Maybe they’ve had a bit too much to drink. Maybe they’ve been sexually deprived for a few weeks, leading to a lot of pent up tension. Maybe their wives (do angry birds have wives? Do they have angry chicks, or is a chick’s mood to be determined by its zodiac sign?) have decided, en masse, to deprive them of sex. Maybe they have a lot of yard work to do.

Maybe enough people haven’t played their game. That’s why they’re angry. They’re angry because not everyone in the world has played their video game adaption. Maybe if more people played their game they’d stop being angry.

Angry Birds is a money making scheme disguised as a game. People play it, but in its ubiquity it has become a phenomenon beyond games. It’s become a game about advertising and branding instead of a game to be enjoyed. Someone will make a movie of Angry Birds and Roger Ebert, that great film critic, will give it a review of one star, saying it’s less worth your time than the game. Video game aficionados will take this as an affront to their gamerly instincts, but Ebert will be right. Why should we be up in arms about the game, anyway? After all, gamers don’t play Angry Birds. People play Angry Birds. Some of those people might play video games, while others’ awareness of pixels and polygons might stop at Bejeweled and, maybe, Tetris.

Angry Birds is Tetris for the modern generation. Instead of manipulating falling blocks to a Russian score of beeps, you’re angry, and you throw things. At least, I think you throw things. My life is a blissful cocoon of unawareness, like an ostrich with its head in the sand. Tetris, though, I know, and this is Tetris: it is a game prized for its addictiveness, a game noteworthy for its out of nowhere success. It was a true victory for the little guy. That the two are comparable in terms of their appeal and their addictiveness speaks volumes for Angry Birds, despite its marketing department.

Angry Birds is a game disguised as a money making device. Whenever someone’s made a game for the iPhone or a flash game over the past two years they’ve wished it was Angry Birds, a game so elegant in its simplicity. It is a game that someone like my father, a man who has been unable to play many games in the past ten years, can play and enjoy as much as anyone else. When Nintendo talks about accessibility and appealing to the casual gamer, a euphemism in their minds to the female gamer, they’re talking about Wii Fit and the Vitality Sensor and other ways to completely ignore video games. When Rovio talks accessibility, they mean literally a game anyone can play, a game anyone can enjoy. They are the true face of accessibility: simple and enjoyable, like a bucket full of popcorn.

Angry Birds is evil hidden behind a happy face. What can Rovio want except to make every game like theirs? The success of Angry Birds reveals to us a hidden future, where one day we will all be chained to our iDevices, playing games simpler than Super Mario Brothers. What path besides this can be imagined? Cheap, portable apps are killing the games business, and Rovio and Angry Birds are heading the charge. They want a world where games are cheap and brainless, and where they are everywhere with us, taking up our precious spare moments.

Angry Birds is a game so insidious, so pervasive, that in the space between these two paragraphs, I was able to download and install it on my computer. I was able to play the first level. Apparently the birds are angry because some pigs stole their eggs. I wouldn’t think of this because whenever I eat an egg I immediately start craving bacon, and I imagine that would be awkward for the pigs. The titular birds found a slingshot and threw themselves at the pig’s castles. On the side of my browser, there is an advertisement telling me to Enjoy the heat with Angry Birds flip flops! I don’t know what kind of person needs Angry Birds‘ flip flops. I guess someone must buy them, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t anyone I want to know.

That’s the kind of thing Angry Birds has become, but consider it at its purest expression: a game for everyone. Accessibility is bandied about a lot like a magic fountain that will suddenly make video games hugely profitable, but at its core is a simpler idea: that everyone deserves the opportunity to play video games. They might not be playing your games, but they deserve to have something made for them. Just like Justin Bieber must exist to tittilate tweenage girls, so must Angry Birds, to show mothers and parents that video games aren’t terrible. That they will not rot their children’s minds, even if they secretly do.

Angry Birds is a piece of garbage. It’s not even entertaining. If this were a review, I’d derisively label it schlock and laugh all the while. It’s about as much fun as throwing a little foam stress ball at a wall and trying to catch it. It’s about as difficult, too. The game is completely mindless to the point where it is brainless, a true zombie game. It wanders around the pathtubes of the internet, calling out, Brains! and we stop and feel sorry for it.

The only way to lose in Angry Birds is to make it impossible for you to win. You do this by causing a pig to be surrounded on all sides by fallen planks without somehow killing him. I imagine the pig probably feels something like a survivor of a building collapse, his oxygen slowly fading away. He’s bacon, but you can’t kill him. So you fling furtive birds at his hidey-hole, hoping to cause enough force to knock him out for good. With one bird out of four you can create a no-win situation in Angry Birds, forcing you to restart. How is this good game design? How is this popular? Are people that stupid?

Angry Birds is a pointless exercise, a show of how shallow and brain dead casual games can be. There’s no thought involved with each throw, just a relaxing tug left of the mouse, tug right of the mouse. There’s no mechanics, no challenge, no adversity, no narrative, no anything that makes a game worthwhile. It is meaningless, repetitive drivel designed to make the player feel better about how frustrating life is.

Sorry your life sucks, Angry Birds says, at least it doesn’t suck as much as I do. The game pauses and adds, now buy my flip flops. This is what games are to Rovio: something that sucks less than awful jobs. I hope the bar for real games never falls that far. I hope I never reach a point in my life where I’m playing a FPS, get shot by a griefer, and say, Man, at least this sucks less than cleaning out people’s toenails for less than peanuts. That’s the rock bottom of the video game industry, and Angry Birds shows us how quick and brainless a ride to the bottom it can be.

Now excuse me while I go back to playing Angry Birds.