Reply To: AB 2 Glitches and Bugs

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David Martin
@david-martin

It definitely sounds like the Gravity Grove levels could use a slight nerf, if so many people are complaining about them and/or quitting this early on. I’ll probably persevere, but I won’t spend any money doing so, so all Rovio gets from my effort is ad revenue, I guess.

While I don’t want to get into the habit of viewing every single difficulty spike in the game as a greedy cash grab on Rovio’s part, I am tempted to feel that way when it gets to the point where no matter what I do, multiple rooms in several of those 6-room marathon levels take 3+ birds to clear. This could be chalked up to my being new to the localized gravity mechanic, but come on, Rovio, that’s why you’ve given us levels in earlier segments of the game that slowly ramped up the difficulty before really throwing the hard stuff at us. This time it feels like it happened right away, and the obligatory “tutorial” screen really didn’t contribute to the learning experience since it was one of those “Just fire the bird we tell you to and everything automatically collapses” types of rooms. Those are neat to watch in action, but I don’t learn much from them.

Gravity Grove is a genuinely cool concept. I really enjoyed being thoroughly confused by the odd-angled structures at first, but it went from reasonably simple to super-hard without giving me any moderately difficult puzzles to solve in between. The most annoying aspect of it is that no matter what I do, structures collapse in a localized fashion and debris gets caught at the boundary between local gravity and normal gravity, not falling onto other structures like it seems it was intended to. There are probably tricks to this that I haven’t learned yet, but I kind of feel like the earlier levels in this set should be designed to teach us those tricks. This was the precedent that was set by most if not all of the earlier level sets. I struggled mightily with some of the Pigsyland levels or the Snotting Hill levels, for example, but for the first several of those levels I was like, “OK, they’re tying to demonstrate where the trampolines or the slime are helpful and where they’ll prove to be a hindrance and you shouldn’t fire directly at them.” Experimentation was often rewarding in the earliest levels of these sets. In Gravity Grove, it’s not. I feel like I’m being punished for getting the answers wrong on a test when I wasn’t given the source material to study.

In general, I feel like Rovio doesn’t understand the difference between fun difficulty and frustrating difficulty. Of course that varies from person to person, and if I wanted everything to be easy I wouldn’t play games like this in the first place. But I really do enjoy learning from difficult challenges. I don’t enjoy the ones where no matter what I do, I seem to lose 95% of the time, with the only wins I get seeming like pure luck, and that’s what’s happening to me so far in the new levels (including the two I was fortunate enough to pass thus far). Levels like the one I’m stuck on should be later in a new level set, not #3 out of 20. At the very least, stop putting a dang umbrella pig or laser pig at the top (bottom?) of every structure so early on. These elements can be incorporated back into the game once we’ve got a better handle on the new curveball that’s just been thrown at us. I know it’s all randomly generated, but at least tweak the likelihood of these extra bird-wasting situations occurring. Save those worst case scenarios for the truly punishing levels later on.