Raise your hand if you're sick of Angry Birds. Yeah, we thought so. Now that Rovio has saturated the market with Angry Birds-branded games, toys, clothing and even fruit snacks, the developer has set its sights on a boy named Alex and his Rube Goldberg-esque shenanigans.
Amazing Alex rolled into the iOS App Store, Google Play and Amazon Appstore on Thursday with nary a bird in sight. The physics-based game follows the same puzzle-solving path of Angry Birds, but instead of launching avian salvos from a huge slingshot, gamers finish Rube Goldberg-style contraptions the protagonist hasn't completed. The game play is great. The pricing, not so much.
Why can't Alex finish his convoluted, incredibly inefficient construction projects? We're guessing the internet destroyed his attention span. Like Angry Birds, the game is addictive as the levels get incrementally more difficult. Rovio has clearly figured out the best way to keep gamers hooked without frustrating us or making its games too easy.
Various items that help complete each level's problem are stored in a "tool box" in the lower-right corner of the screen. Just drag and drop the items onto the playing field, and rotate the objects for your desired effect. You get to play with things like pipes, scissors, ropes, buckets and tennis balls (and that's just in the early levels). Each item has its own properties, and not all of the items available per level are necessary for success. As the game progresses, there's no "right way" to solve a puzzle.
And this is the genius of the game, and what makes it better than Angry Birds. When you solve a difficult Angry Birds level, you usually move on, happy to have bested the pigs even if your success feels more like the product of chance than raw skill. But in Amazing Alex, when you solve a difficult level, you'll likely continue to play that level, hoping to get that final third star, or to fine-tune your assembly line contraption to share with others using Game Center.
Sharing how a puzzle is solved is a great community addition for iOS gamers. What's not great is the pricing scenario.
On both Android and iOS, Rovio charges $1 for the regular smartphone version, and $3 for an HD version. The only difference between the two versions is scaled-up graphics. How about just charging $2 for a universal version of the game instead of asking players with two devices to hand over more cash to play the very same game?
Pricing weirdness aside, Amazing Alex looks to be another huge hit for Rovio, which means we can expect Amazing Alex to fly into space, celebrate every single holiday ever, and possibly end up with birds and pigs in his machine.
