Angry Birds Space Blasts Off: Gadget Helpline’s First Impressions of New Galactic Game!

Angry Birds Space has launched for Android and Apple iOS! We’ve had a chance to have a little play on some of the earliest of the 60 levels, so while we’re still attempting to get some sort of productivity achieved today we thought we’d share our discoveries so far in this close encounter of the feathery kind!

From start-up we could tell Angry Birds Space was going to be a sharper looking game and the opening sequence and animation were crisp and bright, setting up the story with the evil Pigs stealing the Angry Birds’ eggs from Earth and the arrival of the Birds in another galaxy – complete with alien upgrades and ultra-cool sci-fi inspired costumes.

The first stage is appropriately and amusingly titled “Pig Bang” and its gives us a bit of a chance to get to grips with the new space-age format in which we now not only need to plan strategic strikes on pig protecting structures on moons and in orbit outside of atmosphere bubbles where most of the levels take place. We also need to carefully consider the moon’s gravitational pull inside the bubble, so must choose whether to aim above or below the moon and with what velocity as the bird will continue spinning around the moon until it makes impact with foe or fortress – or gets pulled plummeting to the ground!

Fortunately there’s the helpful red dotted targeting line which helps us aim our attack and predict a course for our catapulted bird. In these first few stages that’s the classic Red Bird, but soon you’ll be handling the triple threat Blue Bird, which splits into 3 smaller birds, as well as multiple overlapping bubbles which contradict each other’s gravity. It can start to get a little bit confusing!

At points some of the action escapes the atmosphere bubble and you’ll be taking pigs out in orbit, popping their individual bubbles and bashing objects around in space. There’s a lot more to the physics and diversity of play than any Angry Birds game we’ve ever experienced before and somehow we even managed to get into a bonus level mid-normal play, which let us use the Firebomb Bird in a Space Invaders based mini-game!

Angry Birds Space really reinvents the recently repetitive series in both style and performance and we’re looking forward to giving the new out of this world avian invasion a thorough play – and get to purge pesky porkers with that brand new Ice Bird!

The latest Angry Birds is an app-based game which can be downloaded for just 69p from the Google Play store (formerly Android Market) or from iTunes for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch with iPad coming in at a little bit more. But if you don’t fancy forking out that massive fee, you can also play for free using the ad-supported Android version!

Angry Birds Space for Android (Free Ad-Supported)

Angry Birds Space for iPhone & iPod Touch (Paid)

Angry Birds Space for iPad (Paid)

Let us know your thoughts on our comments below or via our @Gadget_Helpline Twitter page or Official Facebook group.