AB 2 Glitches and Bugs

[LessTisha]

What happened to “watch video, get free entry” in the Arena? It completely disappeared for me 19.3.16 at about 1600 UTC.

[Jakernaut]

Since the update the game will not load completely. It will fill the lid bar then leaves the game back to my phone home screen. I’ve already deleted the game and downloaded it again and no change. Any suggestions?

[Matt Bracci]

I’m in the same boat. iPhone 6 here. Can’t load game. Restarted phone, reinstalled, still just goes back to home screen as soon as load bar is full. Do they just release updates without testing or what??

[Aeshna]

Just had Terrence bounce off an inflated pigshead like it was solid stone. Quite amusing Rovio.

I’ve also a massive exploit to report, it worked for a week but has now stopped, but I’m sure you’re too busy trying to fix the update that has stopped so many playing this game. Nothing but problems, bugs and glitches……

[kedik22]

@aeshna

Hi.
Would love to hear about that new/non/working/now exploit.
I bet it will only make me more frustrated!!!
Kind regards.

[Aeshna]

@kedik22 –

This has stopped working after a week.

I have stated previously, everyone has a different game experience. This was wrote before the Rovio Easter fail……..and no longer works.

When I go to arena, I have 5 ducks and 6 chilli’s, amongst the other spell cards.

I play one arena and use duck and chilli. (I win)

I play free arena and use duck and chilli. (I win)

3 hours later I play arena and on entering arena I still have 5 ducks and 6 chilli’s.

They go down during play but are re-instated next arena.

I haven’t tried any other combination. I haven’t tried all 5 cards in one game.

The two spell cards virtually guarantee me a win. I’ve lost one arena in this current week, out of about 32 games.

I’d never thought that this may be the reason so many are playing spell cards in the arena. Looks like I’m not the only one with this bug then!

It looks like Rovio are that understaffed, they can’t and don’t play test their games thoroughly.

It is quite funny being 1,500,000 ahead at the end of the arena match, and the opponent pulls three bird cards out of thin air, yet I still win.

[kedik22]

@aeshna

Thank you for such a detailed and complete explanation.
Did not expect it.

And yes, now I am more frustrated with Rovio for letting this happen.
It is unbelievable!!!

I has suspected less spells were being used in the arena, now I know it is a fact.
I thought that maybe I was the poorest (or the most frugal) gamer of the lot.

So, I hope Rovio will clean this huge mess up shortly.

Kind regards.

[cognitive]

The next question is where all the spells are coming from. Sure as heck they’re not coming from the game, all I keep getting is Blizzards (which I belittled in a previous post, but now in level 450+ there’s more granite than I care to deal with).

Do people actually spend a lot of real money for spells to win out? that defeats the whole purpose of the game (from a competition point of view, tho it makes perfect sense financially).

[David Martin]

Allow me to play devil’s advocate on the topic of new levels being released more frequently. I like having new levels, at least in principle. I re-play through the existing levels a fair amount just because I enjoy doing so, and I’ve even found that some of the newer structures introduced in later levels have a way of cropping up in the earlier levels after game updates. Even though each one was not fully designed by a human to be 100% unique, I am surprised at how much the variance can cause me to really have to think through a level layout that seemed easy before.

For those who don’t want to slog through the new levels – which I understand because they can be challenging and often seem repetitive – are you losing out on something by not doing this? My understanding was that if you wanted to skip those and just do the Arena, you were welcome to do that. Is the issue more than now you can’t get to a new and different area of the game when one is released, such as not being able to play Gravity Grove because you haven’t made it through all 60 of the water levels? (The issue of not being able to play it due to the game crashing notwithstanding.) Maybe that could be worked around by more clearly dividing the levels into chapters, a la Seasons and most of the earlier AB games, where you can skip to the beginning of any chapter but you have to start with that chapter’s first level in order to unlock the levels after that. (It would certainly make browsing the levels a lot easier – if I’ve finished the last level and I want to scroll all the way back to 1 and start over, that takes a while!)

My main issue with the random structure selection within each level is that it sometimes seems rigged against the player. Especially in a six-room level, if you’re going to make it all the way through, you basically have a “par 2” for each room. From Pigsyland onward, there are often situations where there’s a tall enough structure on the left that I can’t get my first bird over it, and of course there’s a magician pig in the rightmost structure. I want to hit him first to make him move, but I can’t. So bird #1 has to knock down the leftmost structure, bird #2 has to knock down the rightmost one, then the magician reappears in a part of the level I’ve already cleared and I have to waste bird #3 just to get him. If a “strike-able” room doesn’t come up at any point after that, I’m out of luck. This is especially irritating on boss levels where the only viable strategy is “have a lot of birds leftover to beat the snot out of the boss because you can barely get him to budge.” I feel like the game should at least make sure it doesn’t set up situations where you have no choice but to waste an extra bird and can’t make up for it. If there are truly humans involved in the level design (and I believe Rovio’s statement that there are), they should take more precautions to make sure the procedural level generation rules out some of these extraordinarily unfair scenarios, so that the game can go back to a state of just being mildly unfair.

I’ve also noticed in Pigsyland that several of the trampolines cause the birds to act as though they have hit hard surfaces – e.g. red losing his ability to yell, or Bomb being activated upon impact. This makes certain layouts nigh unwinnable that, before whatever update caused this glitch, were relatively easy because you could count on trampolines to get your birds to far corners of a room without “activating” them. Nowadays, if you don’t have Terence available at the exact right moment, you’re up a creek.

And don’t get me started on the indesctructible tiny pigs. There’s no way to predict when one of these guys is going to survive an improbably high fall and roll into a crack where no bird can possibly reach him (except for maybe Bomb or the Chili spell). Sometimes one ends up where I can’t even see him! I’ve got several screenshots of such scenarios completely impeding my progress in a level – far too many for me to believe it’s just a fluke.

@aeshna – I’ve come to expect the whole “Terence bouncing off of stone structures” thing and actually used it to my advantage in several layouts – for example, if the rightmost structure is all stone then underneath it to the left, there’s a flower or geyser or something that will direct you back at the middle and leftmost structures. If Terence can at least crack the middle part of the rightmost structure to make it slowly crumble, and he gets fired back toward the other structures, it’s possible to get a Strike in such a scenario.

I agree that it’s still annoying and seems like a bug, though. What makes far less sense to me is how Terence can get completely deflected by a tiny balloon.

[LessTisha]

I should have known better than to install an update just before the end of a tournament. [Android]:

Matilda was at 1346/1400. Awarded 51 (Level 41) yesterday [2016.03.25]. After the update and playing thew new levels, I received 30 feathers for Matilda (at treasure beyond 503), and her score is now 1376 (1346+30), as though yesterday never happened.

Red received 51 feathers this morning (from 1274 to 1325/1400), and is now back at 1274. 10 each feathers for Bomb and Silver awarded (treasure) earlier today are gone.

Arena tickets now cost from 20 to 26.33 jewels apiece and must be acquired in bulk, rather than ad hoc. Cost increase ranging from 66.6% to about 121%.

AB2 is beginning to look like the political process in USA (E.-U.A/EEUU) – s/he who spends the most gets elected (wins the tournament).

AB2 crew – if you are listening/reading: You cannot monetize play if people stop playing. I am seriously considering discontinuing participation. I may not be alone

[Sutekh137]

@david-martin

Someone who writes posts as long as mine! I love it! I’m also a big fan of Devil’s Advocacy. *smile*

What you are saying is completely reasonable (of course). Yes, I could stop playing the new content and just not worry about it. After a few months, I’d come back to 100+ new levels and would simply stop playing the game. That’s just me. I play for completion, not trophies or leaderboard scores (the only reason I care about winning the Arena is to get gems to help with campaigns to help with, you guessed it, completion).

One part of your post, while still entirely reasonable, is something I can’t quite wrap my head around — you replay AB2 levels? May I ask why? I find them so incredibly samey, and high scores don’t even matter any more (because you can come back when your birds are at a higher level and easily shatter any previous record). So…what is the point? I assume you’ve finished all other Angry Bird games and have replayed all those levels as well? Space has daily missions, Seasons has pseudo-quests, etc. Why replay samey, lengthy levels in a limited-life game like AB2 when you could be playing all that other new, more imaginative content?

Your discussion of difficult rooms (especially involving teleporter pig) is dead on. It’s also why I never replay a level once it is three-starred. It’s not challenging, it’s just…capricious at best (and money-grabbingly difficult at worst). If you enjoy replaying levels, though, don’t you like the way the levels are “mixed up” every time you play through? If they were more samey or didn’t sometimes have an impossible bit to them, where would be the “fun” in replaying? That’s why I am trying to figure out what you see in AB2 as far as replay value.

But each to one’s own, for sure. I do think Gravity Grove is quite a bit more imaginative in terms of recent releases (the water levels were not and didn’t even take advantage of the water very much; plus boss levels were completely derivative). I have not reached a boss level in Gravity Grove — I am expecting it to be pretty fun, though (I hope!).

Thanks,
sutekh137

[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.

[Sutekh137]

@david-martin

It sounds as if we are much alike… I have not spent anything on AB games (how did you get Mighty Eagle with in-game currency? Was there a mini-game I missed out on?). On Space, I only feathered everything once the Mirror World missions won me enough Space Eagles to take care of business. *smile* I still haven’t feathered any other spot that required Mighty Eagle because I am too cheap to spend money on that!

That being said, if I could get an ad-free version of any AB game, I would pay for that. It’s the in-app stuff I can’t stand. When it comes time to buy Bad Piggies for my daughter (oh, she will have it and MUST love it! *smile*), I will have no problem spending 99 cents or $1.99 (BP is probably my favorite AB-related game of all time).

I guess when it comes to AB2 levels I see things a little differently from you. I think randomness plays a WAY larger role, and I don’t find that challenging. To dust off an old tale I tell, one six-roomer WAAAAY back (in the 200s, maybe?) took me days to complete. I must have spent at least 40-50 lives, but no continues. No continues because I rarely even saw the final room. Then, one morning I tried again and I finished the level with NINE cards in my hand. From rarely seeing the last room to nine cards. Skill had nothing to do with the win any more than lack of skill had anything to do with NOT winning, and I wasn’t getting any “better” by continuing to play the level.

I miss the arc line in the old games, but that also feels like a grittier challenge to me. I agree that original AP games have a lot of “one bird just right” nonsense to them, and I’ve lost a lot of time on them, too. But at least when I do complete a level it feels like I really earned it instead of just getting lucky with debris, pig placement, structure types, or face-up cards.

Then again, I don’t replay ANY AB levels once they are three-starred, the exception, of course, being Epic where farming a level is useful for earning snoutlings or gathering resources. That’s a whole different ball game, though.

Gravity Grove is ending up being a grind, and I am only 4 levels in. Hopefully there are more clever dynamics later on, and hopefully the Boss levels aren’t just variations on a very simple theme.

Thanks,
sutekh137

[David Martin]

@sutekh137

Whoops, I should have clarified that I bought the Mighty Eagle in a few of the old games, not because I needed the help beating levels, but basically because it added an entirely different challenge to all of the existing levels. I’m generally OK with paying once for something I can use infinitely, which is why I liked the old “buy the game once and play it as much as you like” business model way more than the new “get the game allegedly for free and the be constantly pestered to buy stuff” model.

I too would pay for an ad-free AB2. I’ve noticed that the ads have worked their way into AB Seasons now, which is disappointing. At least I no longer have to worry about app crashes. But now there’s a new wrinkle, because I’m new to the iPhone and I have to remember to tell these apps to not use cellular data when I’m not on wifi. It would really irritate me to go over my data limit because of all the stupid ads these games had to download.

I thought Bad Piggies was absolutely brilliant when I first got it. The puzzles took a lot more ingenuity to solve than in any of the AB games, because you had to build rather than destroy. But the most recent level sets that take place in the dark, I’ll be honest, I haven’t enjoyed those at all. And I never bothered with the speed runs because my reflexes just aren’t quick enough for that sort of thing.

I never replayed levels in the old AB. Just once to 3-star (and only on rare occasions would I skip one and come back to it if I’d only 2-starred it), and once again to get 100% Eagle.

In AB2, when replaying through the game, if I fail a level twice in a row, especially if it’s one of those where I can tell it’s almost always going to be stacked against me, I usually just skip it and move on. Usually that’s just a handful of the six-room levels and a few of the more annoying bosses where the only viable strategy is “just hope you can hit him hard enough to keep him from bouncing right back into the same debris pile”. With that said, there have been a few that were a huge pain the first time around, and yet upon going back to them, they typically haven’t been too much trouble.

I could probably come up with some good candidates for your difficult 6-room level in the 200s, if only I could open the app at all right now. My hunch is it involves one of the following early in the level, when you just have to hope you start out with the right birds:

* The Bamboo Forest room where you have to fire up and over a tree to hit a low structure on the other side, and there’s almost always a floating obstacle in the way requiring you to waste a bird.
* The Cobalt Plateau room where you need two flowers to spit your birds up to the top two structures, the bottom structure blocks the first flower, and there’s almost always a pig at the very bottom of that structure, where he’s hard to hit even with Silver.
* One of the many Pigsyland rooms where there’s a structure high up on the right side of the screen that is nearly impossible to hit with any bird other than Chuck or Matilda. (These always do me in whenever they show up in the Arena.)

[Sutekh137]

@david-martin

I have enjoyed the darkness missions in Bad Piggies, though will admit I fed the King all my sweets to get goggles. Map out the whole level and then proceed from there. Some levels are definitely a grind, and levels that are pure race-strategy are not as fun. I also hate the suction-cup-on-a-string device. Sandboxes are super fun.

Not sure what level had me so stymied, but I don’t think it was Pigsyland. All I recall is that when I beat it I had a golden pig and drew into two Mighty Eagle dishes. That’ll turn a hard level around really quick. *smile*

I was just playing some Gravity Grove and realized another reason why I don’t mind the lack of an arc in older games — Chuck. By learning how things fly without the aid of the dotted line, I found I have become better at timing Chuck’s secondary launch. I have gotten pretty dang accurate with him, even on non-full-power shots and the straight-up-then-fire approaches. I’m still far from being any kind of master, but Chuck is an example of where the dotted line helps less — so practice without the dotted line can be of service.

Thanks,
sutekh137

[David Martin]

@sutekh137

Is that what feeding the King Pig is for? I never got anywhere useful with that. I’ve never been a big fan of the BP levels that require you to build a flying machine. It’s just way too easy to screw up and have to start all over just due to a split second of turning the wrong device on and bumping a wall. The suction cup thing is total trial and error, but I’ve had better luck with it for the most part.

I’ve still somehow managed to fail AB2 levels that threw more than one golden pig and/or Mighty Eagle spell my way. Often with the latter it’s due to hubris on my part. I’ll be on the second to last room with 2 or 3 birds left, plus an Eagle, and think, “This room looks doable with the birds I have and I can save the Eagle for the last room”, then I’ll proceed to screw it up, need the Eagle anyway, and have no birds left for the final room, which of course turns out to be way easier than the previous one. I’ve also lost levels due to being forced to Eagle a room with hardly anything in it, or at least not anything the Eagle can topple (like structured supported by balloons), thus depriving me of points I would need for extra birds in later rooms. GRRRRRRR.

I’m really stingy about saving the heavy-hitters (Bomb and Terence) for rooms where there’s a lot of stone or other situations where it seems like nothing but brute force will work, so often my downfall is that I can easily clear the last pig from a room with one of these, but instead I’m cheap and I try to do it with another bird that requires me to be super-precise, miss, and get forced to use the one I was trying to save anyway. I’ve learned to not be “cheap” in the Arena and just use the most powerful bird at my disposal to minimize those kinds of screw-ups that conveniently leave one pig alive even though you’ve leveled everything else. Often the bird I just used, I get right back anyway, whereas if I save him, I won’t get a duplicate.

I’m pretty good with Chuck with or without the guide, and also Matilda. It’s with the other birds where you can’t change their trajectory in midair that I appreciate the help in aiming. (Obviously you can change Silver’s, and I probably wouldn’t need the help in his case, but he doesn’t appear in the older games.)

[Sutekh137]

@david-martin

Sent you a friend request so we can take this convo offline… But yes, feeding the King is how you can get all sorts of goodies! Goggles and Super Glue are quite helpful in dire situations! *smile*

Thanks,
sutekh137

[cognitive]

“I think randomness plays a WAY larger role, and I don’t find that challenging. To dust off an old tale I tell, one six-roomer WAAAAY back (in the 200s, maybe?) took me days to complete. I must have spent at least 40-50 lives, but no continues. No continues because I rarely even saw the final room. Then, one morning I tried again and I finished the level with NINE cards in my hand. From rarely seeing the last room to nine cards. Skill had nothing to do with the win any more than lack of skill had anything to do with NOT winning, and I wasn’t getting any “better” by continuing to play the level.”

Pretty much my experience as well. When you get a golden pig in 4 of 6 rooms and your bird line up is so optimal for the conditions it’s not even funny… And you get a ME as a bonus.

Randomness plays way too much of a role here.

[kedik22]

@sutekh137

@david-martin

Hey guys, reading you two going back and forth is quite enjoyable and a good learning experience.
Would be nice if you kept sharing with the rest of all of us ignoramus!!!

Kind regards.

[David Martin]

Finally got into Gravity Grove today. Oh dear GOD, are these new levels a pain. Lost every single one of my lives on the third level. The difficulty ramped way up before I felt like I really had a chance to learn the new mechanic. This isn’t fun at all.

[Mighty Red]

@david-martin Just wait until you get to the boss levels – all 3 boss levels are 5-wavers. The first one (Level 506) is the toughest, at least for me.

[Sutekh137]

@kedik22

@david-martin

@mighty-red-1

Well, I can’t say it was any one level, but a confluence of events has made me make a big decision. I’ve quit and uninstalled AB2. I sync’d with Facebook and backed up my android game file, first, but it’s gone. I’m probably not going back.

Basically, you are right, David. I don’t need to be a completionist and let this game run my life (because it kinda has). Couple that with other developments:

— Crashes introduced with mew update. (David, did they release a new update? How are you playing — I thought it crashed for you?)
— Arena matchup woes. I faced all-7 opponents five times yesterday and lost to most of them.
— Difficulty of some Gravity Grove levels — they aren’t really THAT bad, but I HATE five-room boss fights and am tired of being tempted to spend gems on continues.
— New content keeps coming with no end in sight — can’t keep up with my completionist nature.
— More and more predatory gem-grabbing, including new buttons for continues on Arena battles (where it makes ZERO sense to continue). I almost clicked the continue button every time I played yesterday because I automatically thought it was the “Next” button after the battle was over. I wonder how many gems got spend with this update just from people accidentally clicking that new, stupid button?

The final thing that I realized is that while I really respect and am grateful to guys like @bankler, I don’t feel like much is being heard from the user community. Yes, some bugs get fixed, but then new gameplay mechanisms are introduced that appear even more money-grubbing than before. Alternately, ideas for improvements (or gripes about changes) are met with, “No, this is what the community really wants and it makes the game stronger.” I’m not even necessarily saying that’s not true, but if it IS true, then it’s just not a game I am interested in being part of the community for.

Oh, and Blizzard still exists. I’ll still have nightmares about that stupid spell for months after I stop playing! *smile*

That’s not to say I won’t be around — I will be! Still nice to see what other folks are into and how everyone is doing. Met tons of cool folks on this forum alone, even folks I can get along with when we disagree. That’s cool.

So, that’s my news for the day. Happy flinging!

Thanks,
sutekh137

[Kt]

@bankler

I am having many peculiar experiences with the game. I started out in the vanilla league and came in 2nd. Promoted to bronze league, came in first. Promoted to silver league, came in first. That would give me 1 silver medal and 2 gold medals. But I was given, first 26 gold medals, then after the second win 5 more, so I show 32 gold medals instead of 2. Then instead of moving up through the leagues, I was moved abruptly into the Diamond League where I have remained. I have seen other players mention this same sequence of being promoted from a much lower league right up to the Diamond League in this Forum and also being given way too many gold medals. It is assumed that this is some kind of bug in the programming. This round of Arena Games I started out in the Diamond League with a set of players and the next afternoon I was in a new set of players, none of whom are playing. This morning 2 of them started playing and this afternoon I am with a new group of players, none of whom are playing. So of course I am at the top of my group because I am playing. Now when I enter the arena, I am being matched with players whose birds rank higher than mine and who bring in extra cards. I have a hard time finding a fair match to play in the Arena. I have three FB friends who are playing the game, but none of them show up in the game “friends” column so I cannot send gifts to them and receive gifts from them. When I sent my “invitations” to them, the game said it was sent, but that could not be verified and they are still not on my “friends” roster. Hope you can help with all this.

[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.

[ger_ych]

Decided to call it a day with AB2. Thanks Rovio for the past 8 fun months…