Angry Birds Journey

I downloaded Angry Birds Journey with a pretty simple idea in mind: pull back the slingshot, hit the pigs, that's it. And the first few levels really are just that, relaxed and easy, with nothing much to think about. Then on level four I stopped short.

Not because the level was hard. It was because the words Out of Birds suddenly appeared in the middle of the screen, meaning I had no birds left, and right below them sat a big green button offering to let me keep playing for 950 coins.

That was when I realised I was playing a different game from the one I thought I had installed. It's still Angry Birds, still Red, still the green pigs, but the design borrows from the candy-matching games you have probably played: you get a fixed number of moves per level, and when they run out the game asks whether you'd like to pay to keep going.

How a level plays out

As soon as a level starts you'll see BIRDS 10 in the top-left corner. That's how many birds you get for the whole level, and every bird you fling knocks the number down by one. Run out before the objective is done and you've lost.

The catch is that those ten birds aren't meant for a single castle. Once you clear the pigs out of the first scene, the screen slides to the right and a completely new fortress appears, and the birds you have left are exactly the ones you haven't used yet.

You need to get through three scenes like that to finish a level. In other words, waste shots early and you pay for it at the end, and that's what makes the game harder than its friendly looks suggest.

There's one big change from the Angry Birds of old that is worth mentioning up front so it doesn't catch you off guard: you no longer tap the screen to trigger a bird's ability.

You used to fire Chuck and time your tap just right to make him speed up. Now Chuck automatically slices through whatever he hits, and Bomb explodes the moment he touches something. If you loved that old timing, it will feel a little empty at first, because the part where you got to show off your skill has been taken away.

In return, the game shows you which bird is coming next. That sounds minor, but after a while you'll find it's almost the entire strategy. If you know Bomb is next, for example, you use the bird you're holding to crack the outer shell and leave a gap, so Bomb can slip inside and wipe out the whole cluster in one blast.

Five birds, and Red comes last

This was the detail that surprised me most: you don't start with Red.

The opener is Chuck, the yellow bird who dashes sideways and slices a line straight through wood and stone. Bomb only turns up after you clear level 4, and he's the one I like using most, because he blows up on contact and smashes stone very satisfyingly. The other three take longer still, unlocking at level 9 and level 17, and you don't have the full team until level 28.

That makes just five birds in the whole game, with no Blues trio and no Matilda like in earlier entries. And Red, the face of the whole franchise, ending up as the final reward instead of the starting point feels strange to anyone who has stuck with this series for years.

What else is there besides slingshot levels

Every time you win a level, you pick up a few pink gems on top of the coins. You can't spend them like money; they automatically pour into a progress bar named after the region you're playing in. Mine was called Ancient Ruins.

As the bar fills, it opens new stops along a path that winds across the island, and each stop has a gift waiting: sometimes 100 coins, sometimes a mystery chest, sometimes ten minutes of unlimited play with no worries about running out. Reach the end of the path and the fog ahead clears to reveal a whole new region, and then the cycle starts all over again.

What I like is that it doesn't ask anything extra of you. There's no base to build, no garden to water every day, and no upgrade screen where you have to weigh up costs and benefits. You just keep playing, and the game takes care of the storytelling. For a game you pick up for fifteen spare minutes, that's exactly enough.

And this is where the game starts making life hard

Everything stays pleasant right up until your first loss.

Losing a level costs you a heart, and you only have five. Burn through all five and there's nothing to do but wait, with each heart taking more than twenty minutes to come back. And if you run out of birds partway through a level, the game opens a dialog with two choices: spend 950 coins for three more birds, or watch an ad to get one.

That sounds fair enough until you work out whether 950 coins is a lot. In the early levels, winning a whole level earns you 16 coins. So to press that Play On button just once, you would have to win nearly sixty levels.

There are a few more generous reward chests along the way, but the numbers make the intent fairly clear: that button isn't there for patient grinders, it's there for people who will open their wallets. And if you do open yours, the in-game packs cost $0.99 to $99.99 per item.

What the mod takes care of

It only changes one thing, but luckily it's the most annoying one: coins.

When you open the game, there's a round red MOD button on the left edge of the screen. Tap it to bring up the options panel, and all you need to do is flip the “Coin Mod” switch. If you'd like a different number, drag the slider or tap the number and type one in; the default is 999999. When you're done, tap the restart button, and once you're back in the game the coin purse in the right corner will be full to the brim.

But a nice number sitting on the screen doesn't prove much. What matters is whether you can actually spend it.

So I went back to the exact spot that had stopped me on level 4 to try it. I tapped Play On, the game took 950 coins, three birds arrived instantly and I carried on shooting as normal. A little later I ran out of birds again, tapped once more, and three birds arrived just the same.

The interesting part is that after two purchases in a row, my coin balance hadn't budged at all. In other words, the countdown that makes this game so frustrating, the number of birds you have left, effectively stops existing.

A few things worth knowing up front so you don't expect the wrong thing:

• The mod only touches coins and nothing else. The pink gems for the Journey and the hearts you need to start a level still have to be earned by playing. In practice I found that rarely matters, because with coins in hand you just buy more birds whenever you run out, so you seldom lose badly enough to drop a heart.
• The real-money shop won't open. Tap the plus sign next to your coin purse and the game says it can't connect. For this particular game that's actually a good thing: once coins are plentiful, having the real-money route blocked means you can't tap a purchase by mistake.
• “Block network” doesn't stop you from playing. In a re-test on version 3.8.4, the game still entered levels and played normally with it switched on. It isn't a firewall, though: it cuts most of the game's connections rather than all of them, so turn it off if you need to sign in or sync to the cloud. To play with no internet at all, airplane mode is enough; I tried it and the game ran perfectly, from entering a level to clearing it and collecting the full rewards.

So how does it feel to play?

To be fair, the core of the game is still a joy. That feeling of lining up a shot for ages and finally hitting the load-bearing pillar, so the whole tower comes crashing down onto the two pigs below, is something Rovio still gets just right. The visuals are smooth, the colours are bright, and the crashes sound wonderfully crunchy. Spreading each level across three scenes also makes the pacing much richer than the one-scene levels of the older games.

There are things to criticise, too. Removing tap-to-trigger abilities takes away the room good players had to show off, and that's what many long-time fans miss most. The pigs are now drawn as blocky squares and look a lot stiffer than they used to. And there's always a lingering sense that every shot is quietly being metered for money somewhere in the background.

Even so, the numbers paint a fairly clear picture. The game holds 4.3 stars on the Play Store from nearly 249,000 reviews and has more than 10 million downloads. It's a light casual game that does its job well, not the flop you sometimes hear people call it.

One small detail few reviews mention: the settings offer fifteen languages, from English, French and German to Korean, Japanese and Indonesian. You won't lean on them much anyway, since there's very little text in the game; almost everything is told through pictures and numbers, so it all makes sense at a glance.

So who should play it?

If you're looking for a light game to tap away at in spare moments, with pleasant visuals, no need for an internet connection and not much to think about, Angry Birds Journey is a sensible choice.

And if you've downloaded it before and given up halfway, whether because the 950-coin button blocked your way or because you burned through all five hearts and sat staring at the countdown, the coin mod unties exactly that knot. Out of birds? Just buy more, as many times as you like, and everything goes back to where it belongs: you, the slingshot in your hand, and a tower waiting to fall.

This review is based on version 3.8.4, which is also the latest version Rovio has released. I installed the game through VipMod and played it for real on a phone, with no root needed.