Pretty much all of my family has been obsessively playing Angry Birds at one time or another. Hearing that it was coming to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 got me wondering how well the touch screen centric experience would translate — not least to the Move and Kinect control schemes.
Angry Birds Trilogy takes that touch screen game from Smartphones and Tablets and fits it to a home console. As you can see in the Angry Birds video review here, the first thing we noticed was the variety of different ways you could control it. The Xbox 360 version lets you jump in with Kinect for full body bird slinging, while the PlayStation version offers Move support.
Both these gesture control schemes are optional, meaning you can revert to using a gamepad if that’s your preference. This meant that different family members could play the game how ever they preferred — something that was a complaint of the Kinect Angry Birds style game Wreckateer that forced you to use Kinect controls.
I was interested to seeing how different aged players in our family naturally gravitated towards different control schemes. After a while we agreed that the PlayStation 3 Move controls offered the best all round experience by combining motion controls and buttons.
The game includes levels from Angry Birds Rio, Angry Birds Classic and Angry Birds Seasons — as well as some exclusive and new levels for this version. Even for those of us who had played quite a lot of Angry Birds on other devices there were still plenty of levels to keep us busy.
The only feature we’d have liked to see added was a multi-player mode in the main game. As things stood we came up with our own turn-taking approach so we could all play together.
One benefit of playing Angry Birds Trilogy on a big screen, that I hadn’t anticipated, was how much more involved the kids got while playing. As you can see, they got into creating their own Angry Birds nests and towers in the den from which to play from. In fact they got so involved in this mini-project that they spent as much time designing their own towers and nests as they did on the videogame. For us this more than justified the higher price than what we had paid on tablets and smartphones.
Angry Birds Trilogy is available on 360, PS3 and 3DS from Amazon.
