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aka: Angry Birds Under Pigstruction

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Pain is temporary, anger is forever.
Red

Angry Birds 2 is the official sequel to Angry Birds. It was soft-launched in Canada under the name Angry Birds: Under Pigstruction on March 5, 2015 and was released worldwide on July 30 of that year.

While the story is the same (the birds are after the pigs for nabbing their eggs, this time by chasing after their airship where the eggs being held) and gameplay is fundamentally the same, there are many changes that make the game feel totally different from the original. The graphics, sound effects, and animations are much more advanced, there are more features, including incorporates many of the elements that were introduced in previous AB Spin-Off games, such as adding a limited life system. The birds' & pigs' character designs have also changed based on the Angry Birds Toons series, most notably introducing a new bird, Silver, who does a backwards loop and plummets straight down with great force.

Not to be confused with the sequel to The Angry Birds Movie.


This game provides examples of:

  • Action Bomb: The Hot Chili spell causes one pig to "ignite" and explode much like Bomb's power.
  • All There in the Script: While it wasn't shown in the gamenote , this animated short fleshed out the plot a bit on how the chase began.
  • Battle in the Rain: The boss battles always take place during thunderstorms.
  • Boom, Headshot!: Invoked; if you land right on a pig, you get a "Headpop!" notice and a score bonus.
  • Boss Battle: In each area, every 4-10 levels, you have to defeat one of the three "boss" pigs (Chef Pig, Foreman Pig, and King Pig, in that order).
  • Boss Bonanza: An early 2017 update changed the King Pig challenge from a single 5-stage level with a random boss pig at the end to three levels with increasing amounts of stages with a boss pig at the end of each in no particular order.
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall: The pigs would occasionally look at the screen and insult you in any way possible and sometimes even when you missed a shot. In addition, the boss pigs also doing this by laughing evilly at you. If you lose an Adventure level, all three boss pigs have their evil laugh onscreen.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory:
    • The crystals earned as bonuses can be used to buy extra birds to continue a level, extra spells, refilled lives, or entries in the arena.
    • The black pearls earned for completing the daily challenge levels and as prizes in the arena can be used to buy themed hats for your birds that can increased their score multipliers. When a full set of a particular multiplier theme is completed, your slingshot gets an upgrade.
  • The Bus Came Back: When the game was first launched, Hal, Bubbles, and Stella were nowhere to be found and the game had features that made up for their loss. Silver's power incorporates the backwards turning aspect of Hal's ability, the Pig Inflater uses Bubbles' ballooning on the pigs as a weapon, and the Astronaut Pigs cause all nearby objects to temporarily lose weight and float up when popped just like Stella's soap bubble ability. However, Stella, Hal and Bubbles have been added in as "extra birds" in the October 2018, December 2018, and March 2019 updates, respectively.
  • Camera Abuse: ZigZagged. Occasionally popped pigs, wooden timber and exploded rocket debris will be launched at the screen but will just fly past (and sometimes through) the camera, subverting the trope. Played Straight, however, with the boss pigs, which do hit the screen and slide down if they are defeated by depleting their HP.
  • Character Customization: You can buy many hats for your birds to wear. In addition of them increased your birds' score multiplier, collecting a whole set of them gives you a slingshot upgrade.
  • Cool Airship: The boss pigs fly around on a rickety airship that looks like something out of Bad Piggies. Whenever you beat one of them, the next in line will fly away with the eggs.
  • Cool, but Inefficient: This game, along with almost every other game in the series, gives you a 10,000 point bonus for every bird remaining when you beat a level. However, this bonus isn't affected by your score multipliers, meaning you'll get 10,000 points per bird... added to the 15,000,000 you got from the structures in the level.
  • Death from Above:
    • The Golden Duck spell rains golden ducks on the towers to pop pigs and possibly topple towers. Variants of this have also been used, usually as some form of Product Placement such as the bats from Hotel Transylvania 2 and the Hatchlings from The Angry Birds Movie.
    • In keeping with her falcon-like appearance, Silver divebombs her target.
  • Death of a Thousand Cuts:
    • The goal of one particular boss pig fight is to dump him into a tall chasm with a fan at the bottom that keeps blowing him around. If you don't knock him out with falling debris, you can launch birds into the same chasm and use the fan's circulation to tap him into popping via glancing impacts.
    • In level 10, the boss pig can land and stop on a ledge via the spitting plants, which can also continuously spit a used bird into the air to cause tap damage whenever he lands on the boss pig, falling back to the ground to be sucked in and spit back out by one of the plants.
    • Some boss stages that can set the boss pig in motion via stage hazards (such as trampolines and the aforementioned plants) can put the boss pig in such a situation that he keeps taking damage until his health is depleted, stopping the need for more birds if one has patience; for instance, one stage with the plants has a slope leading down to a plant which will suck up the boss pig and spit him out, who will then hit the wall right beneath the slingshot and fall onto the slope, also rolling down and reaching the plant again which will keep spitting him out over and over, leading to small but gradual damage and eventual defeat.
  • Developer's Foresight:
    • The special pigs who nap when you let them idle too long won't be able to use their abilities until they wake up. You can use this to your advantage against some of the nastiest pigs such as construction or fireman pigs.
  • Difficult, but Awesome:
    • Hal can qualify as this. While certainly easier to aim than in the original game, his boomerang ability is somewhat hard to aim correctly. However, he destroys things with a much higher body strength and speed, which means he can rival even Terence in destructive capabilities if he’s used correctly.
    • Also, Leonard. His snot balls after the first shot can be somewhat annoying to aim due to the arrow constantly changing direction in midair, but if you can get the hang of it, he can prove to be a very powerful bird - er, pig.
  • Disaster Dominoes: This is even more important for gameplay than in the original game. Every level has stages with multiple towers placed at different heights, as well as blocks and TNT crates suspended in the air, and as you have limited chances to continue, figuring out exactly where to topple towers and drop items so you both conserve birds and cause as much chain reaction damage as possible is a must. Also, the more you destroy, the faster you fill the "extra card" meter, so doing as much damage as you can in a stage is very important.
  • Epic Fail: The game humiliates you with an 'achievement' by this name if for whatever reason you manage to fling 10 or more birds in a row without popping a single pig. And that is likely after paying top-dollar for extra gems.
  • Evolving Weapon:
    • You can earn colored feathers that increase the damage your birds will do and unlock levels of the arena once all the birds reach a certain number of feathers. They are earned in the bonus chests you get every few levels, and every 30 minutes you can get a free reward that will often be feathers. You can also earn feathers as rewards for winning in the arena and for completing a daily challenge.
    • Purchasing all the items in a particular black pearl set (one for each bird) will upgrade your slingshot.
  • Fast-Forward Mechanic: Once you complete a stage or use your last bird, you can fast-forward to the next stage or the "failure" screen, complete with VHS-era screen distortion.
  • Forced Transformation:
    • The Polymorph pig shoots a spell that will change your bird into a random object. In the early versions of the game, this was very likely to be something completely useless like a teddy bear, but sometimes it would be something potentially useful like a rock or a rocket, or even a Golden Pig in really rare occasions. There was also the chance that your bird would just disappear. Nowadays, though, your bird is usually turned into a boulder, TNT crate, or rocket.
    • The Scientist pig has a vial with a potion that will change all the tower materials in the stage to something other than the majority material when he's popped. Good luck if you're stuck with the Blues and the materials have been changed to stone. But have fun if Terence is the one left and everything turns to glass.
  • Freemium Timer: Angry Birds 2 uses a lives mechanic in an attempt to prevent the players from being addicted. There are five lives at the start. If a player loses or quits a level after sending their first bird, they lose a life. If they run out of lives, they can either wait or pay to refresh their lives. This wasn't well-received by fans.
  • Glass Smack and Slide: If you defeat a boss pig through damage, he'll fly up and crash into the "screen" then slide down.
  • An Ice Person: The Blizzard spell will change all the towers' materials to ice in the stage where it's used.
  • Luck-Based Mission: In more ways than one. Probably the biggest change to gameplay from the original, aside from the limited lives.
    • Each stage within a level is procedurally generated; the basic layout of a stage will always be the same, but the individual structures in that stage will change every time. You'll see a lot of the same structures/layouts in different stages as you progress through the game, but you could play the same level many times and never quite get the exact same layout twice, aside from the last stages of the boss levels.
    • The placement of certain types of pigs, objects like TNT, etc. within the structures is also somewhat randomized. If you're really lucky, this results in a golden pig showing up when you really need it, or even an Automatic Level where a missing piece in a structure causes it to topple and bring down everything around it before you've even done anything. If you're really unlucky (which happens far more often), you'll have a Polymorph pig in a spot that you can't really avoid aiming at, and you just have to hope he doesn't transform your bird into something useless when he zaps it.
    • The cards in your arsenal are also randomly chosen. You can choose the order in which you want to use them, but you can only select from the top 3 cards available. This often results in situations where you could clear a level with a specific bird, but you weren't lucky enough to have that bird show up as one of your first three cards. This can be especially maddening on boss levels, where the boss and/or a structure you need to topple onto him (or to even get to him) can only be reached by one or two specific birds that you've already used just to get to that point.
    • Sometimes, during regular levels only, the game gives you a spell card instead of a bird card. You're in luck if it's something like the Mighty Eagle that can clear an entire room, but certain spells like the Blizzard or the Golden Duck can be rather ineffective against certain level configurations, so you're out of luck when a last-minute 1-up gives you one of these instead of a bird that can be aimed at a specific target.
    • Mount Pork levels can get like this. Namely, there are pig-shaped machines which spit out either small or large stones when their designated crystal is struck. The luck factor comes from the stone size being chosen at random and destroying some structures being dependent on activating these machines and hoping they fire the larger variant in the right place.
  • Man-Eating Plant: Several stages feature plants that will swallow anything that touches them, including birds.
  • Mass "Oh, Crap!": The pigs collectively give a faint "Uh-oh!" when you use the Golden Duck and Mighty Eagle spells.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
    • Some pigs have a gravity gun that pulls the bird towards the pig. While this does throw the bird off course, more often than not it also ends up with the bird slamming into the structure and causing a lot of damage or outright toppling it.
    • The Polymorph pigs can turn your bird into something useful like a TNT crate or rocket which will do extra damage on impact.
  • One-Hit KO:
    • Clearing a stage with one bird earns you a 25,000-point "Strike!" reward.
    • Although not common at all and requiring spectacularly lucky shooting, some of the boss stages can be completed with one bird.
  • 1-Up: Filling the meter at the top of the screen will earn you a card which is often one of your spent birds. This is normally done by destroying the towers, but you can also hit a golden pig to instantly fill the meter.
  • "Pop!" Goes the Human: The Pig Inflater spell massively inflates several pigs. It doesn't pop them right away, but it can cause them to squeeze out of towers and platforms to fall and/or collapse buildings, or unbalance a structure enough to collapse it.
  • Required Party Member: Previously, you could add in a single additional flock member, but the whole base roster (Red, Blues, Chuck, Bomb, Matilda, Silver, and Terrence) had to be in your flock. Averted as of the June 1, 2022 update where you could choose whatever combination of eight birds that you like, meaning that you can even put Red, the leader of the flock, on the sidelines!
  • Running Gag: If you buy sets of hats, you may notice that Terrence almost always has a comically tiny hat to fit his large size.
  • Shows Damage: The pigs, in addition to the black eyes and lumps they got in the original game, can now sport bandages if they take glancing hits. The boss pigs are also bandaged and lumped up once they're defeated.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Smart Bomb: The Mighty Eagle is now one of the spells you pick up instead of something you have to purchase; extras can be won in treasure chests or bought with crystals, and sometimes are given when you fill your meter in-game. Instead of smashing objects on the screen, his zooming flyby takes out the pigs and can knock down towers.
  • Stock Audio Clip: Most of the characters' voice clips have been recycled from the Angry Birds Toons series as well as previous games such as Angry Birds Go!, Angry Birds Epic, and even Bad Piggies.
  • Stop and Go: Happens when Terence is launched. The stage music returns a few seconds later.
  • Super-Scream: Red now has a special ability; his yell will give what's in front of him a shove. This can help topple parts of some towers.
  • Super Spit: The aforementioned plants that swallow what hits them? They spit the objects right back out, often at much higher velocities than before. As the plants are usually strategically located in the stages, it's a good idea to drop debris down to where they can glom onto it. Sometimes even launching a bird straight into one is better than launching the bird at the tower(s), especially since the birds can still use their abilities even after being spat out.
  • Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: In addition to knowing which birds are effective against which tower material (they're all the same as before, and Silver is about as good against stone as Bomb), you also have to be smart about choosing which bird to use depending on the arrangement and construction of the towers.
  • Token Heroic Orc: To promote The Angry Birds Movie 2, the August 2019 update added Leonard to the game as an "extra bird", and is notably the only pig among the roster.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Jetpack pigs can fly out of the way of birds and parachute into a safer spot which would be quite annoying, if they didn’t land in places where they roll off and die, fly into a wall and explode, or find themselves parachuting into a bottomless pit. They’ll only use it if a bird comes near them, not when they’re falling to their death. It doesn't help that they're the weakest pigs in the game, to the point where rolling kills them.
  • Unintentionally Unwinnable: In the game's early versions, since birds can't be launched backwards from the slingshot, some of the boss stages could be rendered unbeatable by knocking the boss pig off the left side of the screen. This was eventually fixed to count as a pop.
  • Unskilled, but Strong: Terence is the only bird without an ability as usual and makes up for this by being able to easily smash through most obstacles.
    Red: Terence needs no ability.
  • Vent Physics: Several stages have fans that can be used to guide birds and will also blow debris and spent birds around the screen for extra potential damage. The winter-themed stages do this with steam vents.
  • Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: Sometimes, a structure can spawn with a block missing or partially clipping into another structure so that it collapses and pops all the pigs without the player launching a single bird.
  • Wizard Needs Food Badly: The May 2018 update added a hatchling that you could adopt. It must be fed apples daily, or else it will run off.
  • Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Or rather, Your Eggs Are In Another Airship. Once you take out a boss pig with the eggs in their possession, another boss pig runs away with them to the next boss battle level. And this goes on forever.


Alternative Title(s): Angry Birds Under Pigstruction

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