Angry Birds Trilogy

I had a really tough time with this review for one very simple reason, stemming from a divisive, nasty little five-letter word: value.

What you're getting with your purchase of Angry Birds Trilogy for 3DS is three games (Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, and Angry Birds Rio) that would cost you a total of £2.07 on iPhone or £5.97 on iPad. Except on 3DS they'll cost you £30.

You're not even getting the complete Angry Birds experience - Angry Birds Space is noticeably absent, and it wouldn't have been unreasonable to hope for spin-off Bad Piggies too.

But it still comes just about recommended, and we'll tell you why over the next 400-odd words.

A bird in the hand

The Angry Birds games are top quality products, regardless of cost. They're lengthy, they're beautifully designed, they're charming, and above all else they're really fun to play. If you've somehow managed to avoid them over the last couple of years, here's what they involve.

You have a catapult at one end of a stage, and at the other are green pigs (or caged birds in the case of Angry Birds Rio). You use the catapult to fling your titular avian pals at these pigs in an effort to destroy them. Your porcine enemy is usually hidden beneath teetering towers of wood, rock, and glass, which you'll need to deal with in order to get to them.

It's a classic physics-based puzzler setup, in which you have to use the environment in conjunction with your projectiles to remove your target from play.

Where the iOS versions were occasionally a little inaccurate for fatter hands, with the use of the 3DS's stylus you'll be pinging your feathered friends with precision - though you can use the Circle Pad if you prefer.

Pig problems

The title suffers aesthetically from the lower resolution of the 3DS - things start to look a little blocky whenever you zoom-in to get a closer look.

Thankfully, the strong design pushes through the aliasing, and the endearing yet aggressive chirps of your birds remains a delight. Menus are unwieldy, though, with each selection you make taking a fraction too long.

The additional content isn't all that exciting, but it's a welcome bonus. A few extra stages, a StreetPass mode, and online score leaderboards are nice and all, but hardly enough to make it a crucial purchase for Angry Birds veterans.

But that's not really the audience this is aimed at. Angry Birds Trilogy is for 3DS owners who don't have an iOS or Android device, and though the cost of entry is magnitudes higher on Nintendo's platform there's no denying that the game offers dozens and dozens of hours of top quality entertainment.