What, exactly, a numbered sequel in the context of a wildly popular franchise isn't clear. "And now we’re proud to announce the mother of all sequels – Angry Birds 2!" "With 3 billion game downloads, millions of fans across the globe, multiple mashups and spin-offs, collaborations with A-list celebrities and much more, we’re really proud that Angry Birds is the mother of all mobile game apps," the post reads. Sadly, those great visuals alone can’t save a game that’s simply not at all fun to play.Angry Birds 2, the next iteration of a franchise a dozen games deep, will be released July 30, developer Rovio Entertainment revealed this week. The graphics are excellent, retaining the movie’s vibe, with an excellent framerate and usage of colors. Angry Birds Movie 2 VR presents the movie’s trailer whenever you boot it up, and it’s clear to see how similar the character models are in the game and the movie. I have to commend the game for one thing: the visuals. You’ll have to do the work of four people at once. It’s not fun for kids, it’s not very fun for the VR player, and if you decide to play this on your own, which is weirdly allowed, you’ll have one hell of a miserable time, as the game won’t balance things out for you or provide AI partners to help you out. Three people will be performing menial and boring tasks, while another one will be given occasionally fun, but very sporadic bits of gameplay. This is all performed by the non-VR players, while the VR player is just there, chilling out on his/her mighty throne, shouting out orders and occasionally aiming a plunger on a chest. This is a game in which you have to constantly juggle between materials, clean up the deck, put the treasure in safe spots (or else the game won’t count them at the end of the run), and getting rid of explosives by throwing them into furnaces (logic doesn’t apply here). If this doesn’t look very exciting, it’s because it isn’t. I found the entire gameplay loop to be quite boring, uninteresting, and considering the target audience, too convoluted. Bold attempt doesn’t always mean “surefire attempt”, though. Angry Birds Movie 2 VR tries to break boundaries by offering VR players and their family members or friends an opportunity to play an asymmetric local co-op title. VR games usually don’t feature multiplayer components and those that do only feature online modes. That’s the thing, in this game one person, the captain, will play with the VR goggles on, telling other players what to do, as well as properly aiming at the treasures and enemies with a more precise targeting system, while other players are in charge of creating resources and stacking treasure on their appropriate slots on the normal TV screen. You may be asking yourself: “wait, is this a local co-op game?” Yes it is. This is a local co-op game in which people have to work together, creating materials for the captain to use in order to capture items outside the sub, as well as handling the sub’s internal treasure logistics and figuring out which material needs to be created at any given time, as you’ll have to juggle between toilet plungers, torpedoes, and so on. The closest comparison I can think of when trying to describe Angry Birds Movie 2 VR‘s gameplay is Overcooked. While your pawns do the dirty work, just sit back, relax, and throw a plunger at a chest every now and then. You’re inside a submarine and you’re in charge of a group of pigs and birds who have to collect treasure underwater. Turns out the game is only Angry Birds in its name and setting, as it follows the plot of the second movie (which I clearly haven’t watched), in which the birds and the pigs are now… allies? And they have adventures inside a submarine? Well, whatever the case, that’s also the game’s setting. Given the franchise it’s based on, you’d expect The Angry Birds Movie 2 VR to feature the classic gameplay loop of throwing birds onto piles of bricks and pigs, something the other Angry Birds game for VR devices had already attempted. This title is shared with the 2016 reboot of Ratchet & Clank and Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, by far one of the best dumbest names in gaming history. Not only is this one of the very few, if not the only VR tie-in games out there, but this one also holds the distinction of being a game based off a movie based off a game. Especially if it’s a VR tie-in game like The Angry Birds Movie 2 VR: Under Pressure. Those titles are usually relegated to the wild west frontier that is the mobile market, so a console release like this always attracts my attention. Being able to play a movie tie-in video game in 2019 is an odd experience.
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