![]() ![]() King’s generic aesthetic is handily topped by Rovio’s boldly colored and lavishly animated offering.Īnd despite its questionable origins, Angry Birds Stella Pop is an enjoyable bubble-popper. ![]() Still, if I had to pick between the two games based on App Store listings, I’d take Stella Pop in a heartbeat. In fact, I fully expected the birds to be dressed up like wizards, with the pigs patterned as fantasy ogres. If you didn’t know better, you might think that King was contracted to make an Angry Birds version of its very popular bubble-popper. You’ll wind along the path from event to event, but each new world prompts you to either wait, pay up, or bother your Facebook pals. And in a twist that’s likely coincidental, yet still mind-boggling, the heroine of Bubble Witch 2 Saga is named Stella. ![]() The game screen looks the same, down to the power-up placement (and the power-ups themselves), the win conditions and various level objectives are all very familiar, and even the map screen is carbon-copied here. It’s uncanny: aside from the license swap, the game and interface are identical. Aside from the aesthetic shift, they function and play identically.Ĭandy Crush maker King copied that design for the Bubble Witch Saga series, and it’s last summer’s fluffier-looking sequel that Angry Birds Stella Pop uses for its template. That’s Stella Pop on the left and Bubble Witch 2 Saga on the right. Generally, the goal is to clear the board using a limited number of bubbles. Using a bubble launcher at the bottom of the screen, you’ll shoot the spheres upwards in the hopes to matching at least three like-colored bubbles together on the screen. Sad of a statement as it is about the series’ current mindset, Angry Birds Stella Pop remains an enjoyable freemium game, besting its rival on production values while delivering amusing gameplay-but also difficulty spikes and arbitrary waiting periods.Īngry Birds Stella Pop replicates the core design of Taito’s excellent Bust-a-Move, seen on numerous platforms over the last two decades-including anįree-to-play iteration on iOS. Puzzle Bobble), but really, it’s a near-identical copy ofīubble Witch 2 Saga-from the interface to the power-ups, map screen, and more. This bubble-popping affair is built in the mold of arcade classic Bust-a-Move (a.k.a. Angry Birds Stella Pop is the latest attempt, and it shows that Rovio’s strategy at this point is more or less, “If you can’t beat ’em, clone ’em”-Stella Pop is not only a spinoff of a spinoff (of last fall’sĪngry Birds Stella), but also a copy of a copy. Angry Birds Stella Pop puts Rovio’s top-of-the-line production values to great use, with glossy graphics and alluring backdrops.Īt least $1 billion apiece last year, yet attempts to bring Angry Birds into the free-to-play space haven’t been able to recreate the success of earlier paid entries. ![]()
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