[Review] Angry Birds PSP Minis

Some games show that without advanced graphics they serve the purpose of entertaining, Angry Birds did it in an exemplary manner, this game is more than fun, it’s highly addictive!
How many birds are needed to be sacrificed for a bunch of eggs? The answer too many! These birds will do anything they can to recover their eggs. With over 120 levels of excellent gameplay, Angry Birds arrives to the PSP and PS3 as a Mini.

Story
The story is simple, a bunch of hungry pigs decided to steal your eggs and have them as their next meal, this of course angered the birds and now they will do anything they can to recover the eggs.

Show those pigs how angry you can be, banzai!

Gameplay
Not an easy feat, the pigs have built many fortifications to ensure you cant recover your eggs; fortifications and castles constructed from blocks of wood, ice and stone.
The variety of challenges found in each stage is diverse enough to avoid the feeling of repetitive gameplay, with difficulty ranging from obvious and easy to complex solutions requiring a lot of thought.

Key to the difficulty of each level is the fixed amounts and types of birds you have to complete each state. You can’t just select the birds you want to use in each stage.
Some of the stages are all about physics; some levels are finished by using explosives to knock one or more balls all over the screen.

The moon, the stars, and a bunch of angry birds

Ranks for each stage are based on stars: 1 bad to 3 for a perfect run. Level rank also helps to unlock golden eggs. These eggs are also unlocked by targeting different objects throughout the game with a bird. These bonuses unlock even more challenging stages and puzzles for you to solve.
On the whole this game is very well executed.

Downsides
Unfortunately the PSP/PS3 version of the game has problems including lag issues when there’s alot of action on screen, nothing extreme to ruin gameplay but it would be nice if it was not there. Clearly the game was not optimized for the platform, a patch to fix this would be more than welcomed.

If you play on the PS3 the lag is less than playing over the PSP but the game doesn’t look that good on a HDTV. A release of Angry Birds HD for the PS3 would be an option here but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
With more lag but looking better, the PSP is the way to go with this game.
Often the screen did not return to the slingshot making you wonder if something is wrong, to my knowledge a glitch not present in the IOS. However this is easily sorted by using the L and R buttons but really there’s no real reason for such thing to happen in the first place.
Something else I experienced was a freeze/crashed PSP. I would often let my PSP go to sleep mode and return to play later on only to find it crashed and unable to boot again.
All i could do was remove the battery to get it to work again.
So a word of advice, save, quit the game and then turn off your PSP to avoid this problem.

Different and complex fortifications to destroy

Overall
If the issues stated above could be fixed the game would be even better; these issues can be frustrating but not enough to ruin the game to a point it is unplayable.
Angry birds for the PSP and PS3 is an excellent alternative if you don’t own an IPhone or a mobile with Android, bringing hours of nice gameplay and addictive fun to your console.

We give the game a 7.5 out of 10

~Mario