Angry Birds: Epic

A curious mash-up, this game is what you get when you take Angry Birds' cartoony cast and feature them in a title whose gameplay is a series of Final Fantasy-style battles with touch controls, totally abandoning the series' earlier physics/ballistics themes. The plot is irrelevant, as usual -- some boilerplate business about revenge on pigs having stolen the birds' eggs, now dressed up in medieval fantasy trappings with pirates and undead in the mix -- but the presentation is lush, with a lively overworld map, a crafting system, and robust combinatorial complexity ensuring that sometimes a particular boss is only beatable if the player's party is composed of just the right mix of birds, equipped with specific pieces of weapons and armour. Juggling three different kinds of Rovio currencies, there are plenty of opportunities for in-game microtransactions -- so many so that the game is not playable offline -- and despite deterministic elements in its combat strategy, the game also introduces elements of randomness into play.