Angry Birds

Sometimes when trawling through the various mobile manufacturers’ online distribution services you stumble across a rare gem of a game – an amazing title that blows you away, but which somehow nobody else has discovered yet.

Angry Birds is not that game.

If you’ve owned one of the major smartphones you probably already own a version of Rovio’s sales juggernaut, such is the game’s domination of the world’s collective mobile gaming psyche.

If you’re from 2009 and have just emerged from the jungle, let me fill in that gaping Angry Birds space in your brain-clay.

Some evil green pigs have egg-napped a group of multicoloured birds’ precious younglings and built fortifications to protect themselves from the inevitable backlash.

This backlash takes the form of an addictive, OCD-inducing, physics game in which you slide your finger back over a slingshot and fire the feathered creatures into said fortifications, with the aim of crushing all the pigs on each level and scoring the maximum three stars.

The birds come in a variety of shapes and sizes, each equipped with its own signature move that activates when the screen is tapped

The blue birds, for instance, split into three smaller feathered demons that can decimate glass; the yellow triangular ones receive a turbo boost to smash wood; while the red ones are unique in that they have nothing special about them.

They are, however, fairly reliable for tearing through the various types of materials the pigs use for fortifications.

The fat green mammals in Angry Birds have a lot more constructive nous about them than their three cousins in the nursery rhyme, building their houses from glass, wood, and stone.

The trick is that each level has a few ‘sweet spots’ in the constructions that, when hit, cause the blocks to topple down on top of the villainous swine and score a huge amount of points.

Levels taken flight

Naturally, there’s nothing in this Symbian^3 version of Angry Birds that you won’t have seen before on the other iterations of the title – Rovio has been very consistent with the quality of all its ports.

Which means Nokia owners are getting a worse deal than those with Android and iOS devices. Angry Birds on Ovi is the most expensive version around, yet it’s also the one with the fewest levels – just two worlds to iOS’s four and Android’s three.

The gameplay is just as engaging and as hard to put down on the N8 as it was on the iPhone, so if you haven’t yet sampled the game then Angry Birds for Symbian^3 is a decent, if slightly expensive, choice.