Angry Bunnies: Colossal Carrot Crusade (Wii U) Review

The story of Angry Bunnies is that... Well, there is no story. Unlike its inspiration, which briefly tells the humorous story and exploits of the birds and pigs through seconds-long cut-scenes, no reason is given as to why the rabbits are collecting carrots and attacking foxes. They just... do it, really. Then it is straight into the first level, where it becomes painstakingly obvious that this is more of a rip-off than a clone or even homage.

The object remains the same. Fire angry bunnies (via a pressurised cannon that one of the birds pumps) at wolves that have positioned themselves on stacks of wood, stone, and glass. Not only are these elements lifted, but their graphics even seem to be taken straight from the original. It's a shame the developers couldn't make their graphics more... distinctive.

The gameplay, however much it tried to emulate the original, is disappointingly dissimilar. A true scoring system is absent from Angry Bunnies. The Star ranking system in Angry Birds, which gave up to three stars in a level depending on how much carnage and remaining birds one had is replaced by carrots. Fair enough, considering the game this is, but instead of earning the carrots, they are simply collected in the actual levels. They don't even have to be collected with a rabbit; knocking debris into the carrot is sufficient.

This is not an inherently bad thing, as there were a few levels that make clever use of the placement of rolling balls or teetering planks that both hit the foxes and collect carrots. These are very few and far between, though. More often than not, the levels, which always have Angry Birds in mind as opposed to Angry Bunnies, miss this opportunity, making some of the levels disappointingly easy. All five foxes can be defeated and the three carrots can be collected with one rabbit, with four more left to deploy. Where's the challenge in that?

Speaking of the bunnies, there are five bunny types to use: blue, brown, white, green, and yellow, taking the role of the red, yellow, black, big, and white birds, respectively. The behaviour of the bunnies is, for the most part, so badly programmed that they bear little resemblance to that of the birds. The blue bunny lacks any sort of significant strength (similar to a single blue bird in both weight and size); the big green rabbit has nowhere near the wrecking ball strength of the big bird; and the yellow bunny can drop bombs not just once, but as many times as the GamePad is tapped without limit.

Most sinfully, the white rabbit doesn't even explode as the manual itself claims, but instead bounces in what appears to be a completely random direction at a completely random velocity. This is simply unacceptable.

Even more irritatingly, the brown and blue rabbits are the only ones that follow the short trajectory guide that it presents, making it arguably more useless and misleading than if a guide wasn't given in the first place. The one thing the game possibly has over Angry Birds is that the ability is given to change the order of birds that haven't been loaded into the cannon yet. This is perhaps the sole gameplay element that actually isn't minded about the game. Sometimes, that may be 100% necessary to actually complete the level. There is an online leaderboard, but all it shows are the total number of carrots each user has collected and total levels completed. No joke, this reviewer was in the top 20 after only a half hour of playing this.

The game itself looks, in a nutshell, eye-gougingly bad. The colourful 2D sprites that Angry Birds is known for and which is actually shown when the game is selected from the home menu were expected, but as soon as the game loads the game presents ugly 3D models of the five bunnies above a crude Earth, with a shockingly low-res subtitle of "Colossal Carrot Crusade" beneath the title. Seriously, it looks like a bad N64 title in terms of graphics. The user interface is super basic, the level select looking like pictures that were put there using Microsoft Paint. Even the graphics that play at the end of the level after some carrots have been collected encompass the screen with stars of this poor quality.

The worst part about all of this is the pricing. £5.99 has to be forked over in order to "enjoy" the game. Considering one can get any selection of over eight versions of Angry Birds completely for free on mobile devices and a couple online, all of which contain over twice the number of levels of Angry Bunnies and much, much more inventive and revised gameplay, paying £6 for this is simply unforgivable.

On the whole, it is asked that Wii U owners pay this title no attention, despite its colourful eShop advertisement.