To help celebrate the 4th birthday of Angry Birds the founders Rovio have released a brand new game, Angry Birds Go. Rovio has released the game on all major smartphone platforms, and this time they decided to go for the freemium option, meaning the game is a free download with tons of in app purchases available. Unlike previous Angry Birds games this one does not require you to fling birds across the screen to take out the other ones, but instead it is a racing based game.
Combining some of the best aspects of old games like Mario Kart and Crash Bandicoot Angry Birds Go still has the birds fighting with the pigs, but this time it is on the race course. Once in the game you can chose your race from the red bird, the King Pig, Chuck, Terence, Stella, or the Mustache Pig to start with and you are given a standard car that you can upgrade through the game play.
Having gone the freemium route there are definitely some differences with this game, and some things that many are going to wish were not inside. When you start out you get only one car, which is just a basic one, and you can earn cash in the game to upgrade the car or you can use an in app purchase and buy a new car. The cars vary in price from $3 to $50, which is a hefty sum of money to dump on a race car in the game. Additionally you are given five units of energy which deplete during the race and they refill one energy each 10 minutes so you can’t just play endlessly.
While this will certainly get more people started on playing with the free price tag, we could expect to see long term losses here as most people won’t want to spend much money to upgrade the vehicles and buy other specials inside the game, or will they? Let’s hope that Rovio shares with us some overall stats on how it goes for them with only a freemium model, and no paid download as they have done in the past.
