Genre: Puzzle
Developer: Rovio
Publisher: Rovio

Angry Birds' menu, stage, and character artwork is colorful, extremely high resolution, and consistent in the direction of its art. Most pleasingly, the style doesn't try too hard to be either "retro" or inordinately "cute"; as such, it stands on its own merits.

The theme song is nothing if it isn't as kooky and oddball as the character designs. The sound effects fit the overall direction of the title's style, although they don't manage to lend quite as much individuality to the characters as other Era 1-leaning titles.

Angry Birds' stages are not particularly inventive-- not even as imaginative as those from middle-tier puzzlers, such as ChuChu Rocket-- and are intensely trial-and-error in nature. This would normally be a sign of deficient level design. In this game's terms, however, the trial-and-error focus is the crux of the title's cleverness.

What separates Angry Birds from nearly every other puzzler is that the entire focus of the game is on losing repeatedly until a solution to the stage can be found. There is just enough ludonarrative potential for the game to reach near-brilliant levels of addictiveness-- stronger character designs and a little less correlation between simple luck and success could have made this game a permanent pillar of the puzzle game genre.