Angry Birds has already merged seamlessly with Star Wars in a pair of mobile games, but now its developer Rovio is trying another pop-culture mash-up: Angry Birds Transformers.
That’s right: “Birds disguised as Robots in Disguise,” as Rovio puts it, with the familiar Angry Birds – Red, Chuck, Stella and co – each mapped onto a specific Transformers robot, from Optimus Prime to Bumblebee.
It’s a game with two distinct target audiences: adults who remember the original Transformers cartoons (and toys) as well as the more recent films, and children – some of whom may have discovered those original cartoons through the ToonsTV section of previous Angry Birds games.
What do you need to know as parents? Well, this is a new form of gameplay for Angry Birds: instead of slinging birds at pigs, each level sees a character stomping along shooting at blocks in the background, with you guiding their aim by tapping on the screen. The end result is still toppling pigs, but it’s a new and fun way to do it.
For adults, there’s also the option to sign in using Facebook then invite friends’ characters along for the ride: they don’t have to be online playing with you, though – instead, their character zooms in two or three times during a level to help with the destruction.
As you progress through the game, you unlock more Transformers and level them up by spending the gold coins that you earn, with new abilities and attacks every few levels.
What else do you need to know as parents? In-app purchases. Angry Birds Transformers is free to play, but sells gems from an in-app store in quantities of up to £69.99 at once. Needless to say, you MUST have your in-app purchase restrictions turned on before leaving a young child playing the game alone, or you could end up with a hefty iTunes bill.
In some ways, the game isn’t too pushy with this feature: you can earn gems by playing, for example. That said, the game does also use “timers” that occasionally mean you have to choose to wait a bit before playing again, or spend gems to speed them up. For younger kids – my five year-old being a good example – this may be a bit complicated to understand, and thus lead to tantrums if they think it’s you making them wait, rather than the game.
One more aspect of Angry Birds Transformers is its companion line of Telepods toys – real-world figures of the characters, which can be scanned in to the game. Expect to see plenty of them in the shops leading up to Christmas.
Anyway, the game itself is very good fun – I’ve been working my way through it in the evenings and on train journeys quite happily – but if your children want to play it, you’d be advised to either sit with them, or make sure you’ve set your restrictions and had a conversation about not spending money in-app without permission.
Angry Birds Transformers is a free download for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store.