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‘Angry Birds 2’ is Angry Birds, Too

Yay.
Photo courtesy Rovio

Angry Birds 2 is out today on iOS and Android. It's a simple, physics-based puzzle game, where you're asked to murder cartoon pigs by flinging birds and collapsing whatever structure's protecting the green pigs. In short, it's a lot like Angry Birds.

Remember Angry Birds? You must, because for a while there it was the mobile game, in the same way that Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans are currently still the first and fourth top grossing apps on the iTunes App Store.

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Angry Birds stuff was all over the place. There was Angry Birds-branded candy, toys, and toothbrushes, to name just a few things you'd find at CVS, and countless of Angry Birds mobile game spinoffs: Angry Birds Star Wars, Angry Birds Rio, Angry Birds Transformers, Angry Birds Stella, etc. There's even anAngry Birds movie coming next year, starring Maya Rudolph, Danny McBride, and others.

Behind the branding bonanza, however, the Angry Birds brand has been on the decline. Developer Rovio has seen some big layoffs last year, its net profits cut in half, and the departure of its gaming chief.

The developer has struggled to maintain the game's popularity and catch up with an evolving app store ecosystem. The original game launched in 2009, before the free-to-play model, which gives the game away for free and let's players buy in-game items to improve the experience, dominated the mobile app stores.

The first Angry Birds cost a $1. Angry Birds 2 has caught up with the times, and is free-to-play, though you will inevitably hit a point where the aggressive monetization methods kick in. After failing a few times, you'll have to watch an ad or pay to try again.

I've played Angry Birds 2 for about 10 minutes. It looks fine, as far as these things go. It's beautifully animated, and the physics puzzles, which have been fun since computers have been able to simulate physics, are still pretty entertaining.

It's more Angry Birds, in case you haven't had enough.