Reply To: AB 2 Glitches and Bugs

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David Martin
@david-martin

@sutekh137

Like you, I play for completion and just the personal satisfaction of having “beat” the game. It’s fun to win at the Arena every now and then (I was on track for my first ever gold before the last update shut us all down), but I figure there’s always a human who has more time to spend with the game than I do, and better motor skills than mine, so I’m not too worried about being the best among human players.

I replay AB2 levels simply because I enjoy the mechanics of the game and the challenge of the solution to the puzzle never being exactly the same twice. After a while certain strategies emerge for specific rooms, and that can get repetitive, but there are some rooms where you know you need Terence or Bomb to clear it in one shot, and when one comes up and all I have is Chuck, Blues, and a Blizzard spell… well, it’s an interesting challenge if I’m not already short on birds. On the earlier levels when there are plenty of birds to spare, I find it fun to challenge myself and see if I can clear a room with the most inappropriate birds. Just experimenting and seeing what I can get away with, really. On the later, harder levels, those rare occasions when I clear a tough room with a single bird are so immensely satisfying that they make up for whatever frustration I experienced getting it wrong before.

I was pretty thorough about going through most of the other AB games, even getting 100% Mighty Eagle score on the ones where you bought the Eagle once and got unlimited use out of it. But once AB2 was released and the mechanics of the game changed pretty significantly, I found that it had ruined me for the old AB games. Whenever I go back and play them, I’m frustrated that I don’t get a dotted line to guide my trajectory in some of them, and that I can’t swap the order of my birds around. More often than not, the solutions to those levels involve hitting the exact right spot with the first bird and hoping the chain reaction works out just right. It took me hours to three-star some of those. With a lot of the newer levels in AB seasons, the solution seems a bit arbitrary, since there’s so much floating in midair that only falls down under circumstances I still don’t completely understand, and even when I three-star a level I don’t really get the satisfaction from it because the solution seemed somewhat random. (I’m somewhat reluctantly going through the new Valentine’s Day set now, since I was forced to take a break from AB2.) In AB2, aside from a few annoying glitches that have me screaming “HOW DOES THAT NOT KILL HIM!!!!!”, when I solve a level, I understand exactly how and why my solution worked. When I try something unorthodox and it doesn’t work, I know not to do that again for the most part. I feel like I can learn from the game rather than just randomly flinging birds and hoping for the best. That leads to a lot of “a-ha!” moments when I redo levels and realize I was making it way too hard on myself before.

An important thing to note is that I haven’t spent one single red cent on the game. I’m always that way with any game that is offered as a free download. I never make the in-game purchases unless they can be made with in-game currency. So I’ll happily trade in gems for feathers, or occasionally to replenish lives when I’m determined to get past a level I’m stuck on, but I’ve never paid my way past something difficult. If I’m out of lives, out of ads that I can watch to get extra chances, and I don’t feel like spending 60 gems (which I usually don’t, because the 80-gem reward is just around the corner), I just put the game down for the 2 1/2 hours it takes to replenish lives, and do something else. (Usually go to bed. If I had infinite tries like in the old AB, I’d probably have some sleepless nights.) 500 levels thus far, and some of them have taken 20+ tries, but I’ve passed them all with only what the game gives me for free. (And most of this was done on my iPod Touch 5th generation, which didn’t have a new enough iOS to really support the game, and had a bad habit of crashing when I tried to view an ad to get that one last bird to pass the sixth room on a really tough level. It all seems so much easier now that I finally have an iPhone.)

I agree with your assessment of the water levels – the water mechanic didn’t add much for me but frustration (especially once they introduced those scuba pigs which were almost impossible to coordinate with the toppling of structures above, resulting in lots of extra birds wasted), and those have been some of the least enjoyable levels for me to replay. Then again, I wasn’t all that keen on the water mechanic in the old games, and even the zero-G levels in Space and Star Wars got old for me after the novelty wore off. I like making stuff fall on other stuff, not making it float and be completely ineffective.

I’m looking forward to Gravity Grove, whenever they manage to get this update glitch fixed.