An Unpolished Downgrade
As a long-time player of Birzzle Pandora, I was pretty amped up to see a new game using the original formula after quite a number of years. I say this with complete sincerity that after playing for a while, I’m pretty disappointed with this revival outing.
Before discussing what this game lacks, I want to discuss some of the positives this game has.
+ Better options (We can separate the BGM and SFX now without relying on bugs)
+ While I was kinda iffy on the redesigned birds at first, I’ve grown to like them in their own way.
+ I really like the animation that plays when dragging birds around the playfield. Same goes for the animation that plays out the Enfeel logo.
+ All of the music and sound effects are preserved from the original, which in my opinion still hold up well today.
Alright, and now, the negatives:
- While the old sounds are there, some of them are missing or play incorrectly.
- The birds don’t render properly on my iPad mini 2. When idle, only the eyes are visible. The birds do become visible temporarily while dragging them around. (Swapped to iPhone 13 Pro after this, where the birds display correctly)
- When dragging birds around, they sometimes get stuck until the screen is tapped again. This sometimes causes some weird interactions if there are birds on top while this is happening.
- This game only has the classic mode available. Ice Breaker mode and Pandora mode are missing. No achievements either.
- The gameplay in general seems to lack a lot of the polish that the original version had.
- To top it all off, the game freezes upon reaching Level 83. The level will start, and then the screen locks up and you are unable to do anything afterwards and will have to force close the game manually via the iOS Home Screen.
I hope that Enfeel, if they still want to work on this game, at the very least address some of worst issues of this game and patch out the level 83 lock-up, and maybe the rendering issues on older devices.
For everyone else, just get (or stay with) the original Birzzle Pandora. It’s still up on the iOS App Store and to my knowledge, still works on the latest versions of iOS (albeit with a few issues due it’s last update being from late 2015) and has more overall content for the around the same price if you get both the iPhone and iPad versions together.
Before discussing what this game lacks, I want to discuss some of the positives this game has.
+ Better options (We can separate the BGM and SFX now without relying on bugs)
+ While I was kinda iffy on the redesigned birds at first, I’ve grown to like them in their own way.
+ I really like the animation that plays when dragging birds around the playfield. Same goes for the animation that plays out the Enfeel logo.
+ All of the music and sound effects are preserved from the original, which in my opinion still hold up well today.
Alright, and now, the negatives:
- While the old sounds are there, some of them are missing or play incorrectly.
- The birds don’t render properly on my iPad mini 2. When idle, only the eyes are visible. The birds do become visible temporarily while dragging them around. (Swapped to iPhone 13 Pro after this, where the birds display correctly)
- When dragging birds around, they sometimes get stuck until the screen is tapped again. This sometimes causes some weird interactions if there are birds on top while this is happening.
- This game only has the classic mode available. Ice Breaker mode and Pandora mode are missing. No achievements either.
- The gameplay in general seems to lack a lot of the polish that the original version had.
- To top it all off, the game freezes upon reaching Level 83. The level will start, and then the screen locks up and you are unable to do anything afterwards and will have to force close the game manually via the iOS Home Screen.
I hope that Enfeel, if they still want to work on this game, at the very least address some of worst issues of this game and patch out the level 83 lock-up, and maybe the rendering issues on older devices.
For everyone else, just get (or stay with) the original Birzzle Pandora. It’s still up on the iOS App Store and to my knowledge, still works on the latest versions of iOS (albeit with a few issues due it’s last update being from late 2015) and has more overall content for the around the same price if you get both the iPhone and iPad versions together.
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Why can’t I see the birds?
This is no t the Birzzle I used to use ... waste of money
