How could a game with such a simple concept at heart, turn into something so deceptively diffcult to conquer?
The Angry Birds Trilogy combines 3 core Angry Birds games into a single offering. This includes Angry Birds Classic, Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio.
Each of these is further broken down into themed episodes, which contain a varying number of levels to complete, culminating in hundreds to get through.
The concept of the game is to simply beat levels using a variety of birds, all with different abilities, by destroying all of the hogs within that particular level to progress onto the next. The exact same pick up and play formula which made Angry Birds so popular on mobile devices.
Due to the nature of the game being both incredibly straight-forward, and consistent in this theme throughout, it makes you wonder how this can be so difficult to complete, so allow me to explain further.
Firstly, around half of this 51 trophies strong list is progression-based with trophies awarded for just finishing each episode contained with all 3 game versions, so you'll go a long way to finishing this list through just completing all of the levels. To complete a level, you simply have to kill the pigs within the allowed amount of birds you have to launch at them. This is the same concept applied to every single level, hence the straight-forward, consistently themed nature of this game. If you don't kill all of the pigs, and run out of birds, you'll fail the level and have to retry it.
However, there are additional ways to go back through levels and beat them, which is where the replay value of this game kicks in, along with where the difficulties start to bear their teeth.
The "You are Elvis" trophy, awarded for getting 3 stars in every single level, requires to go one further than simply completing the level. In order to achieve 3 stars in a level, you have to destroy all pigs, along with creating as much environmental damage as possible, to the point where you have to achieve a minimum points threshold to earn 3 stars.
For the most part, this isn't too difficult, and it's recommended you do this straight away when completing all levels for the first time, so this will essentially be your first play-through of the game. However, not only does beating every single level in the game become an incredibly time-consuming venture, (It's hard to say how many levels there are exactly, but there are at least a few hundred), a handful of them will cause you all sorts of problems when trying to achieve maximum destruction and get 3 star ratings out of them. This is where the game will test your patience, as some of these levels alone will have you stuck for hours.
The worst thing about this is the fact that it's difficult to influence, and you're at the mercy of lady luck for large periods of this game. Trying the same strategy over and over will eventually work for you, it's just a matter of how long you're willing to keep trying when you hit one of these more difficult levels, which are scattered throughout the game as you progress. It's very time-consuming as a consequence, and can actually be quite mentally draining.
Every time you've felt like you're gathering momentum and knocking levels out within a relatively quick timeframe, you always seem to be halted by a diffculty spike, which kills any sort of previous rhythm you may have had, proving to be very challenging to overcome sometimes.
The "Mighty Eagle" trophy, awarded for getting 100% Eagle score in every single level, is effectively a second play-through of the game. Once you achieve 3 stars on a level, you'll unlock the Mighty Eagle for that particular level only, a huge destructive eagle which, when released, can wipe out the entire environment in one fell swoop.
In order to achieve a 100% score, you need to destroy all pigs in the level, along with destroying 100% of the environment along with it. Not only are you playing through every single level all over again, but you're also going to face the same challenges as previously mentioned. Most levels are relatively easy to score 100% on with the Eagle, but there will always be that one level not too far away which is ready to leave you stuck for hours.
This won't necessarily be the same levels as before, but the same approach will apply, whereby your best option is to simply see how long it takes for luck to favour your side and allow for enough damage to be caused to achieve 100% destruction. If the huge amounts of trial and error present hadn't hit you before when going through the 3 stars journey, it definitely will have done by the time you finish this.
So that's 2 playthroughs of the entire game, and in reality, you shouldn't be too far away from the Platinum trophy at this stage. It's been a long enough journey up to this point anyway, and if you've reached this stage, the end should be in sight, unless the same thing happens to you what ended up happening to me.
The "Egg Master" trophy, awarded for completing all Golden Egg levels, is effectively the end-game, leading on from the previously runs outlined above. There are 61 Golden Egg levels to beat, all unlocked by finding the corresponding Golden Eggs hidden within the various levels contained within the games. Most of the Eggs are both easy enough to find, and also beat, but there is a critical issue lying within this trophy.
The Mooncake Festival episode in Angry Birds Rio requires you to find all 8 pieces of Mooncake to unlock a Golden Egg. If you've used the Mighty Eagle on a specific 1 of these 8 levels prior to finding the Mooncake piece, you won't be able to unlock this piece. It's glitched, and as a consequence of this, you won't be able to find all 8 Mooncake pieces, leaving you on 60/61 Golden Eggs, and therefore, you can't unlock either the "Egg Collector" or "Egg Master" trophies.
The solution? There isn't one. You have to wipe your saved game data and begin the entire game from scratch. If you run into this glitch, you will be forced to start from the very beginning. At this point, I gave up the on the game and didn't touch it for years. After so much effort, and to have such a set-back on the smallest of technicalities that wasn't even fixed with a patch, I knew it would be the sort of thing that would demote a game to the back-burner for a very long time.
If you look back, you'll see how I've essentially told this story from beginning to end, and this explains how easy it was to run into this problem. Some will argue that I should have done the research to preempt the issue, but I didn't, and definitely wish I had done. So the game sat there incomplete, a mere 2 trophies away, but suddenly with hours upon hours of extra work required further to unlock the Platinum trophy.
Now, there are a few things that work in your favour here if you run into this problem, so it's not all bad news.
Firstly, if you're connected to the Playstation Network, your high scores are uploaded to the leaderboard when you complete the level. This means that, even when you delete your save data and start over, some of these high scores are stored via the leaderboard, and in some instances, are pulled through by the game. If this is the case, (and it doesn't happen for every level), you won't need to replay it to achieve the 3 stars again. If you quit the level, the stars will just update. There doesn't seem to be a logical explanation as to why certain levels auto-complete, but you will still have to play the majority of them again. It's only worth mentioning because every little helps in this situation.
Secondly, you won't need to complete every single level in the game either. In Angry Birds Classic and Angry Birds Seasons, you'll not only need to complete every level again, but you'll also need to get 3 stars in every level again (which is also why the above intel about stored high scores on leaderboards is critical knowledge). Golden Eggs in Angry Birds Rio only require you unlock the first Golden Egg, and then each Golden Egg thereafter is unlocked via beating the subsequent Golden Egg level, so at least you can take a nice short-cut here.
Despite this, the glitch adds a ton of additional completion time onto the overall game, and it really is a game-changer in the context of hunting down the Platinum trophy simply for the sheer amount of re-work involved.
Aside from this, the rest of the list is very straight-forward. Apart from the previously mentioned heavy emphasis on progression related trophies, the remainder of the list can be knocked off through natural advancement through the levels, and won't cause you any issues, which is actually just as well given the experience I had with this game.
Even under normal circumstances, I would still angle at around 9/10 for the overall difficulty of this list, purely down to the sheer levels of patience, luck and time needed to complete the game. I would estimate somewhere around the 100-120 hour mark for full completion of the game, which includes the handful of levels which will frustrate you for hours as you strive to finish them and dig deep enough to persist, not to mention the fact you'll have to do this in full at least twice with the Mighty Eagle run.
However, the aforementioned Mooncake glitch is a complete sucker-punch, and worthy enough to notch this score up to the maximum. Having to go through this entire game twice is a solid enough challenge in it's own right, let alone having to face the reality of a glitch that leaves you so close, yet so far away, and will make you play through the majority of the game for a third time. That's more than enough reason to make this game the 7th 10/10 Platinum in my entire collection.
Notable Trophies -
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| You are Elvis - Get 3 stars in every single level Mighty Eagle - Get 100% Eagle score in every single level Egg Master - Complete all Golden Egg levels |
You are Elvis
Get 3 stars in every single level
