Angry Birds Blast Guide

 

Angry Birds Blast is, however, their first foray into the group-matching genre, so this is still new territory for them. And like so many of their other one-off, side project pursuits, puzzle board matching fits the Angry Birds quite well. Blast pits the original five Angry Birds—Red (aka Red), Yellow (Chuck), White (Matilda), Black (Bomb), and Blue (Jay, Jake, and Jim) plus the more recently introduced Orange bird (Bubbles) against their easily recognizable enemies, the Green Pigs. The Pigs have built their usual wood-and-glass forts for protection, but in this game, the Birds have been trapped inside balloons and must be freed before they can take down any Piggy defenses. To free the Birds, players will need to make matches of two or more same-colored balloons. Unlike the more common Bejeweled-style of match-3 we saw in Angry Birds Fight!, Blast uses bunch matching à la the Collapse! series, where tiles are only removed when you tap them and any like-colored tiles that are touching the group will be removed. This allows for very large matches in a single turn but also greatly reduces the opportunity for chains, since tiles don’t disappear automatically when lined up in a row.

Angry Birds Blast tasks you with popping chains of balloons, but this isn’t a bubble-shooter like Angry Birds Pop. Instead, it plays a lot more like Candy Crush Saga, as you’ll need to tap to clear bunches of like-colored balloons from the board. There are also a number of powerful boosters that will appear when you collect larger batches of balloons—such as the 5-match Rocket or the 9-match Laser Gun—which have unique blast radii to help you snag tricky singular balloons. If two of these boosters end up side-by-side, the resulting explosion is massive in scope and usefulness. The result is still not quite as satisfying as a lengthy Bejeweled chain that just keeps going, but it’s still rewarding to see all the balloons burst at once.The individual level goals in Angry Birds Blast will be familiar to anyone with match-3 experience: they range from collecting a certain number of specific Birds (30 Red, 20 Yellow, etc.) to getting hot air balloons from the bottom of the board to the top. Piggies do show up often in their makeshift fortresses, surrounded by glass, wood, and the occasional stone block, all of which can be slowly broken down by making matches nearby.

Goals almost always include removing any Pigs on the board, and larger Piggies like the Foreman Pig take more matches to be knocked off. To help with the trickiest levels, consumable items can be purchased and activated which will add more moves to your total count, provide a free Laser Gun, rotate the entire board, and so on. You’ll need at least two adjacent balloons of the same color to be able to pop them away, and the more you bunch up, the better the perks. Clear five and you’ll get a rocket power-up that can clear an entire row or column, depending on which way it’s pointing. Pop seven at a time and you’ll get a bomb that can take out a cluster of balloons, meanwhile, while popping nine or more gets you a laser gun that eliminates every balloon of a particular color. You’ll occasionally run into some Angry Birds-specific flavoring, such as wood blocks or panes of glass that must be broken to let balloons through—but for the most part, nearly everything in Angry Birds Blast feels like it’s been done before. Tiny twists give it a slightly distinctive feel, but at its core, this is another freemium color-matcher. And it has a lot of the same hang-ups that come with most freemium puzzle games.

Given how large of a role power-ups play in the game, it’s no surprise that you can buy many more of them to help you through the trickier stages. You can buy these perks before a match using the little blue star coins, which are earned gradually through play (or purchased), or bought during matches using the mostly-premium gold coins. These boosts offer quick attacks to take out problematic balloons or barriers, or add extra moves to your limited tally in each stage, and can help provide a speedy benefit when the going gets tough. Angry Birds Blast is a deceptively simple tap-to-match game where you have to tap a tile that's next to another tile of the same color except it's never that simple, is it? Later on, you have to deal with glass and wood structures, as well as other impediments, that need to be broken so you can get at those annoying pigs. On the flip side, tapping a tile next to a bunch of the same color will unlock such boosts as a rocket ship that takes out everything in its path. But while this may seem simple enough, this game gets progressively more clever and challenging, though never to the point of frustration. It's just too bad this also has so many advertisements and links to other games, which makes this seem rather money-grubby.Angry Birds Blast tasks you with popping chains of balloons, but this isn’t a bubble-shooter like Angry Birds Pop. last into a new Angry Birds puzzle adventure game! The birds are trapped inside balloons, and you can bet the pigs are behind it all. Tap matching balloons to blast them to smithereens and free the flock.

Use your balloon-bustin’ skillz to outsmart the pigs and save birds in over 600 egg-celent levels! Find the smartest way to solve puzzles, crack high scores, and earn three stars.Grab rewards every day in the Daily Quest. Already got ’em? Then go join the weekly events or chase down this month's puzzle pieces. There’s also a lack of variety in the power-ups and obstacles themselves. Almost every hazard you unlock comes with the same solution of “match balloons next to it to remove it.” We are only 50 levels in out of the current 250. There’s also very little Bird power, as well: although the “super angry” Birds you save will hang out on the board until they can be of use, all of the power-ups are simple inanimate objects. Using a supercharged Black Bird as the Bomb power-up or the Yellow Bird as the Rocket would have given the game even more of an Angry Birds feel and helped differentiate it from the many others in the genre that have come before.Although the power-ups we mentioned above do help in clearing tough boards, we still found ourselves playing even fairly early levels over and over before coming close to the required goals. A rewarding challenge is appreciated, but Blast often feels random and luck-based, especially when you get stuck with an endless series of matches in a corner that are nowhere near the Pigs you’re trying to take out. We’ve found that if you’re able to complete a level you’ll almost always earn three stars, which indicates that the victory conditions may be set too high if barely scrapping by still hits the top score.