Rovio has taken Angry Birds Facebook out of beta and renamed the app Angry Birds Friends. But what the heck is it? Read on for a full tour of the revised app and all of its cool new features. The short version? For under $3 you can have a pirate bird with an eye-patch and a peg leg. Progress!
The Skinny
When you first fire up Angry Birds Friends you’re shown a simple menu with the game’s new Weekly Tournament feature front-and-center. Gamers can also play around 100 levels from three previous Angry Birds episodes, but the tournament is where it’s at in Angry Birds Friends. On the right you can see the leaderboards for your friends, giving you motivation to earn those three-star scores.
Each tournament lasts seven days and consists of four brand-new levels. First, second and third place finishes earn you medals that can be redeemed for free power-ups.
After every level you’re given a star-ranking and shown how you stack up against your friends. Another free power-up is doled out to reward your effort. Think of it as a consolation prize! You can also brag to any friends that you beat - nice.
Money Matters
Angry Birds Friends is completely free-to-play. “So what’s the catch?” you’re undoubtedly asking yourself. The catch is that everyone wants to beat their friends on the leaderboards – it’s human nature. Players can buy power-ups like a bird super-sizer or a super-powered slingshot to help give them an edge.
You might tell yourself that you’d never resort to spending cash to climb a virtual leaderboard, but let’s see how you feel when you’re just a few points away from climbing to number one. That power-up will start to look a lot more attractive…
Angry Birds Friends also makes money by letting gamers customize their bird avatar. Prices vary, but most props range between $1.00 - $3.00. Some will insist that paying any amount of money for virtual goods is a little crazy, but compared to many social games these prices are fairly inexpensive. Zynga has been known to charge more than $5 for a single virtual Farmville building, for example. Several props are also available for free.
Details, Details
One very cool detail is that after clearing any of the standard stages players can actually embed it on their blog, Facebook wall or anywhere else on the web using a handy iFrame, like the one above. So you don’t need to hear our impressions of how Angry Birds Friends controls with a mouse instead of a touch screen – you can just check it out for yourself. Note that these iFrames still require flash so they won’t work on many mobile devices.
Angry Birds Friends feels great and doesn’t have that nagging feeling of being “free to play” only in the loosest sense, only to drop the monetization hammer later on. I climbed to the top of my friends’ weekly tourney without ever using a power-up. And they’re doled out for free at a pretty generous pace to begin with.
The social features also feel genuinely useful and never come off as annoying or tacked-on. I was never asked to spam my Facebook friends to get ahead. Instead, I wanted to connect to my Facebook friends for leaderboard purposes.
Each level in Angry Birds Friends smartly updates its leaderboard in realtime. See the portraits on the top-right of the image above? As you pop each pig and destroy each block you climb that leaderboard in realtime, knocking out and surpassing your friends. Smart.
Angry Birds Friends is great. It avoids the annoying social and money issues that plague many Facebook games, and offers up many free hours of bird-flinging fun
Source : http://www.ign.com
No comments:
Post a Comment