Bad Piggies

Bad Piggies flips the Angry Birds formula around by putting the green pigs in the spotlight. You play as Ross, a freckled pig who likes auto mechanics. After the pigs' plan to steal the birds' eggs gets scattered across Piggy Island, his job is to recover the missing map pieces by building vehicles and getting them safely to the goal. Ross assembles machines from a surprisingly broad set of parts, including wooden and iron frames, wheels, engines, propellers, balloons, fans, bottle rockets, umbrellas and TNT, then pilot them with on screen controls as everything inevitably starts wobbling, crashing or flying apart. The levels steadily introduce new parts and mechanics while 3-star objectives are still present encouraging experimentation through challenges such as reaching the finish quickly, collecting objects, avoiding certain components or keeping the vehicle intact. There are also sandbox stages built around much larger construction spaces and collecting scattered stars or crates, giving you far more freedom to mess around with your creations. It's all wrapped in the familiar Angry Birds presentation with simple visuals, expressive pigs and plenty of slapstick destruction but the actual gameplay is much more focused on planning, physics and trial and error than its predecessor.

What makes Bad Piggies work so well is that unlike other games, failure is part of the fun. A machine can look perfectly reasonable on the building screen and then immediately turn into a flying pile of scrap once you hit the first slope, so figuring out why it failed and rebuilding it is a big part of the appeal. The game is easy to understand but gets noticeably tougher when you're chasing all three stars, since the challenges demand more precise construction and very careful timing while driving and that makes the New 3DS port feel surprisingly fitting, 'cuz the game itself was made for short hands on sessions.

The touchscreen feels completely natural for placing and moving parts, and also lets you tap individual components to activate them. Right now, it only includes Ground Hog Day, Rise and Swine, When Pigs Fly and Road Hogs, along with their sandbox levels plus Field of Dreams, so there is already a decent amount to mess around with, but it's still a WIP and you can tell. The project is currently on hold, so later content is missing and there are some quirks left behind, like bugs and the unfinished UI. Even so, the fact that it runs well and feels so at home on the handheld is what makes it stand out, 'cuz Bad Piggies was made for touchscreens, quick experimentation and messing around with absurd machines and the 3DS manages to preserve exactly that feeling.

Download

The machine is built, the parts are scattered everywhere and the pigs have no idea what they're doing. Perfect! It's all ready. Now, make sure you're running CFW, then open the FBI app from your HOME Menu, select Remote Install and point your camera at the QR code below. Give it one scan and the package will start flying over to your system. Once the download is finished, Ross will land on your HOME Menu, ready to launch and cause some beautifully engineered disasters.