Is AB2 worth it? (Warning: contains rant)
I never thought I'd have to ask this question about an Angry Birds game.
I've been a fan of Angry Birds games ever since the original and apart from Seasons and Friends, I never missed out on the old AB games and I got Bad Piggies too. All were amazing to play, up to Star Wars 2.
Later I was on a break from AB games for a while playing other games, but a few months ago I started playing Epic again, then the original and then I decided to download POP!. That was the first game that actually made me seriously question what has become of the Angry Birds franchise. Sure, I've seen Rovio going crazy with merchandise and all the new Angry Birds games but I never really minded.
Now, however, I see how many annoying ads appear in the more recently updated games (Original is, thankfully, still an exception... maybe because I paid for it 5 years ago, but I don't know), and, coming back to POP!, Rovio seems to enjoy copying worn-out game mechanics (like how many fricking bubble shooter games do we have?, another example is the Match-3 game ABFight which exists under different names a million times, and the upcoming ABAction too) and cancelling good games like ABStella (which gave me the first giggles on an Angry Birds games in years). All that while trying to pull the money out of the people playing their games, or the parents that want to make their children happy, by introducing power-ups, in-game currencies and a health system that forces you to wait after a certain amount of losses or tries (and I HATE when a game tells me to come back in a few hours to continue - when I wanna play, I wanna play). If those in-game currencies were cheap to buy at least, I wouldn't mind. But for a decent amount of Lucky Coins in ABEpic, Rovio wants an amount of money with which you could get actual, long-lasting content in other F2P games like Pokémon Rumble World/Picross (spend 25€ on in-game currency there and you get a source of unlimited in-game currency! This is not meant as an ad for these games btw, I'm just presenting facts). Also the amount of levels you get in AB games nowadays is ridiculous. POP! has over 600 levels, I only started playing a few weeks ago and while I was playing they introduced more than 100 new levels. I've just passed level 152, for goodness sake, don't throw more levels at me that I know I won't be able to beat, let alone 3-star, without an extremely lucky day or power-ups.
Finally, I come to the reason as to why this is in the AB2 sub-forums. I've been following discussions in this forum for a while now. The game itself seems and looks interesting and a sequel to a game I love is principally a good thing. However, I see a LOT of rants about certain extremely frustrating levels, a recent price increase for entering the Arena (seriously? The Arena in ABEpic is for FREE... well, until you fail 3 times, but I take that as a punishment for me being a noob), game physics that are completely different to the first AB games (what do you mean by that? Pigs are harder to kill? Wood, glass and stone blocks are harder to smash? Structures seem like they're stickied not stacked?), game crashes when you don't need them, and I read the game has a health system like POP! and an in-game currency that Rovio wants you to waste and then buy for real money. What I'm especially concerned about is that health system, though, versus the amount of levels the game has. In earlier games, when I was stuck on a level, or if I thought I did a mistake that prevented me from 3-starring, I'd press that retry button and try again. So if I understand the discussions here right, I'd get, say, 5 retries and then I'd have to pay or wait to continue?
With all that in consideration, I really question whether I, as a year-long AB player and fan with a passion, should bother with Angry Birds 2. What I'd love is some reviews from AB2 players, whether rookie or veteran, and some answers to my worries, questions and thoughts I explained here.
Thanks in advance.