Countless Windows Phone gamers are currently pelting pigs with ball-shaped birds in the original Angry Birds (also known as Angry Birds Classic), which is free right now on both Windows Phone 7 and 8. But the release of that classic game hasn’t prompted Rovio to rest on its laurels. As it turns out, the Finnish developer has another Angry Birds sequel in the pipeline for us. Unfortunately it’s not Angry Birds Friends or Bad Piggies, but still a game Windows Phone needs: Angry Birds Rio.
What do we have to look forward to with Rovio’s latest offering and when? Read on to find out!
Movie madness
Angry Birds Rio is both a sequel to the popular Angry Birds series as well as a tie-in to the 2011 CG animated film Rio that everyone has probably forgotten about by now. But you know, other than being yet another blasted movie about talking animals, Rio wasn’t a bad film! Certainly smarter and prettier than Ice Age, for instance.
Anyway, Rio happens to be about birds, so the pairing with Angry Birds makes decent sense. But instead of being a Rio game that plays like Angry Birds (which would be the traditional way to adapt a film), Angry Birds Rio is basically a regular Angry Birds game with the standard Angry Birds characters that takes place in the movie's setting of Rio de Janeiro. The enemies are marmosets instead of pigs though.
The game also happens to have levels based more closely on the movie every now and then. These consist of boss battles, a first for the Angry Birds series. In these battles, you’ll fling Blu and Jewel, the movie’s lead characters, at the various filmic antagonists such as Nigel, the incredibly evil parrot and Mauro, the leader of the mercenary marmosets (a kind of monkey or something, by the way).
Content predictions
Angry Birds Rio started out as a small-scale game, but has received numerous updates on other platforms – as recently as March 11 of this year! So we can fully expect the Windows Phone version(s) to feature the full seven episodes and two sets of bonus levels. That should add up to 210 levels of bird tossing; not bad for what could have been a throw-away movie tie-in.
Microsoft and Nokia have announced that Angry Birds Rio would soon come to Windows Phone, but not much more:
"Angry Birds Rio is on the way for Windows Phone 'very soon.'"
Still, based on Rovio’s track record so far, we can safely assume that it will come in two separate versions: one for Windows Phone 7 and another for 8. The Windows Phone 8 game will be Xbox Live-enabled, while the other version won’t. Each will cost $.99.
As for the “very soon,” that could be as soon as next week or as late as June. The remaining games we’re missing, Bad Piggies and Angry Birds Friends, will probably make it out well before the end of the year.
This should all be great news for Achievement hunters who also happen to dig Angry Birds. With the addition of Rio, they will have no less than one billion different Xbox-enabled Angry Birds games to choose from...
Big brother version
Speaking of which, Angry Birds Rio is part of the Xbox 360 retail release Angry Birds Trilogy. The Games on Demand version of which is on sale for $19.99 (price varies by region) through May 6. That’s another 1000+ GamerScore you could get, bird flinging addicts!
Thanks to Guilherme S. Manso for the Windows Phone tip!
