REVIEW – Bird Mania 3D

A review by Jeremy Hardin

 

Story

The story – which is told through static screens and is viewable from the main menu – is about a bird named Mojo who’s overslept and was left behind as all the other birds flew south for winter.  Now, Mojo has to fly like crazy to catch up to his fellow birds.  Yeah, that’s it.  The story is simple and forgettable, but that doesn’t matter because the gameplay is the star.

Gameplay and Controls

The gameplay is simple, deceptively so.  See, Bird Mania 3D is a score attack game.  So your goal varies depending on what you want to do.  The main goal of the game is to rack up a high score.  In order to this, you can concentrate on how many stars you can collect, or how many balloons you can pop, or how far you can travel and more.  There are a variety of ways in which you can rack up the points, it’s all a matter of what your strategy is.

Mojo will move forward automatically and it’s up to you to control his flight path as you control his ascent, descent and turbo boost.  Along the way you must avoid trees, although you can fly past their trunks without dying.  You must also either avoid enemy birds and wasps or kill them by using your turbo boost to fly into them.  You can rack up hi score multipliers by defeating enemy birds, popping balloons and collecting a consecutive amount of stars.  One hit will kill you, so be careful.  The game also throws a day and night cycle as well as weather at you.  The night cycle seems to slow down as to give you a break, but it doesn’t last for long.  When you die, a game over screen appears, displaying your score and stats as well as the best score and stats achieved thus far.  Kept on record are how many stars you collected, balloons you popped, enemies you hit, hi score multipliers you racked up and the distance you traveled in miles.  In all there 50 hi-scores recorded at any one time.

There are a variety of control options, but the one I found to be best, was the stylus.  You control the boost with either L or R.  You can also use the d-pad, circle pad and the face buttons to control Mojo.  Rest assured, there is a control scheme for everyone out there.

Visuals and Sound