Day 292, Game 292 - Angry Birds Rio

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Like I said, just when I thought Angry Birds couldn't reinvent themselves anymore than they already had, they went and decided to do a tie-in with an upcoming digitally animated blockbuster movie. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense, especially since Rio is all about colorful, quirky and kind of crazy birds, just like Angry Birds. 

But honestly, at the time, it felt like the franchise was selling out, trying to earn a quick buck on the coattails of a movie and essentially trotting out the same game once again, just re-skinned to match the movie. Again, this is what I just assumed before jumped in to the game for the first time. Once again, as much as it is starting to sound like a broken record, the franchise surprised me again.

Angry Birds Rio completely melted together and combined the traditional Angry Birds game with the Rio movie, which honestly, I had little interest in even watching until I played this game. They recreated all the main areas of the movie within the game as levels, but that's not where they stopped. Instead of trying to kill pigs, you instead were trying to free captured birds from the poachers. In other levels, you were trying to defeat evil monkeys. And then Rio did the unthinkable. 

They introduced boss battles. After all Angry Birds had done to this point, the traditional game mechanic of defeating bosses had been absent from their games, until Rio. And I had totally forgot that until I went back and played this game again. I forgot how fun it was to look for golden fruit, use birds I've seen in a movie and most importantly, defeating bosses. 

Cash grab and easy money because of the movie tie-in? Yeah, maybe it was, but they also went above and beyond to make sure everyone who bought the game felt like they got a complete, new game, not just a re-skinned blueprint of the successful franchise. 

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