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In some cases, Angry Birds Epic is going to be many players' first encounter with a turn-based RPG. While it might not be the deepest of experiences to old-hands at the genre, we felt it was the perfect time to provide you with some helpful hints to start you off, as you work towards wiping out the evil pigs yet again.

Basic Battle Strategies

Regular RPG players will tell you that there are a few core principles that apply no matter what game you're playing. Angry Birds Epic is no different in that respect.

Knowing your enemy is always key in these kind of instances. Angry Birds Epic makes it simple with holding a finger to each pig - enabling you to see what abilities they possess, so you know exactly what to expect.

There's no penalty for exiting to the map at this point so you can easily do that to change birds or hats (special abilities), so that you're at your strongest for each fight. Remember: different classes work better in different situations!

Generally, you should always focus on healer pigs or ones that can resurrect other downed pigs. There's no point inflicting plenty of damage on other enemies if the healer can undo your good work with one spell!

Some pigs are immune to certain statuses, so consider that before you make your move. A pig that can resist poison? Well, don't bother trying to poison it then! It's a simple idea, but one that can easily be forgotten about in the heat of battle.

There's nothing to be gained from weakening multiple pigs at once, so always focus on one pig at a time. Ideally, and assuming there aren't healing pigs to pick on, you should go for the weaker and smaller prey first before taking out the big brutes.

After you've built up a sufficient number of attacks, you can use a rage chilli to perform a special attack that relates to that character's abilities. Use it up whenever possible. They don't carry over between battles so there's no point letting it go to waste! The only exception here is when dealing with wave battles as it's better to save the chilli for the start of a new wave. They replenish frequently so you can often use a couple during a series of battles.

Unlike in other RPGs, using a health potion doesn't take up a turn. It's a small yet significant thing to consider, given it can make all the difference in battle.

Struggling to defeat a particularly tricky foe? Watch the videos that Rovio keep offering. These give you a 20% increase in health and attack power. They're limited in number so try to save them for a special occasion. They can really make all the difference.

Always have a healer in your party. Attacking like crazy is all well and good, but it's pointless if you get wiped out too soon. Healing helps. A lot.

General tips

Equipment is key throughout Angry Birds Epic. It's simple enough to craft from pieces gained during battle, but there are some useful ways to make it all the better.

Replay missions often for more items and loot that can then be used elsewhere. Plus, aim for those magical three-star victories. These are based upon how much health you have at the end of a battle so heal up just before the end for the maximum chance of three stars.

Check the scavenge points every day for new loot to be acquired. It can be pretty profitable.

Similarly, daily dungeons unlock after a certain point and these are invaluable.

Get friends involved as they can enable you to re-roll when crafting equipment. Re-rolling dictates whether you get the fabled 3 star piece of equipment or a weaker 2 star one.

Save up for a Golden Anvil. It's not cheap, needing Lucky Coins to buy one, but keep leveling up and play naturally for a week or two and this should be possible. A Golden Anvil means better gear, which makes all the difference in battle.

Retry, the latest game from the Angry Birds moguls at Rovio, apparently comes from the publisher’s new educational gaming branch. But if that’s the case, the only thing this game teaches is that life is nothing but unending punishment. Prepare for high-flying death over and over again in the latest edition of It Came From Canada!

Retry takes the brutally difficult flight controls of the infamous Flappy Bird but has players navigating finite, designed levels instead of endless rows of pipes. Pressing the screen boosts the player’s plane forward and also aims it up slightly. Meanwhile, letting go causes the plane to fall. With limited control over their speed and trajectory, players have to rely on careful yet confident taps to make it through these death traps. One brush against the environment, aside from water or wind currents, equals instant death. Sometimes the only way forward is a well-timed and skillfully executed loop-de-loop. The name Retry itself refers to how often players will be restarting the game. They’re even forced to look at the ghosts of their past selves, crashed against the walls, as their trial-and-error toils on.

There are a few oases in their desert however. Each level has a handful of permanent checkpoints, but in a devastating twist, they can only be activated if the player has a coin. Most sections between checkpoints have a coin somewhere in them, but they are usually in tough to reach spots - making the game even harder. If players can’t manage that, which is truly understandable, they can also just pay for coins. They can even earn them outside of gameplay by completing easy achievements like crashing a bunch. Overall, the checkpoint system is an intriguing compromise between being fair to the player while still honoring the game’s core commitment to hair-pulling challenge levels.

Sadism isn’t the only thing Retry shares with Flappy Bird. Both games use a chunky, pastel, pixelated art style and peppy music that belie their dark hearts and cruel, true natures. Retry has four worlds with various visual themes like “summer” and “the future.” Expect to see the same skies often though, because while the game has a decent amount of different levels, its difficulty and frequent restarts inevitably lead to repetition. Fortunately, that also means it will be a long time before players experience all the game has to offer.

Retry is currently in a soft launch phase, but once Rovio finishes toying with the Canadians, expect them to unleash their torture on the rest of the world soon enough. With the amount of effort this takes, it’s probably easier to just learn how to fly a real plane.

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After their smash debut, the Angry Birds have gone from physics-based puzzle games to space adventures to kart racers. Angry Birds Epic, the newest entry in the series currently in a soft launch phase, continues the franchise’s evolution into the Mario of mobile by casting the birds as heroes in a turn-based roleplaying game. We grind through this ambitious spin-off for the latest edition of It Came From Canada!

When the dastardly Prince Porky and the rest of his pig army steal innocent eggs, it’s up to a brave band of birds to stop him. Starting out with a lone red warrior bird, the player’s party soon sees new recruits like a yellow wizard and white healer. There’s no real overworld to explore in Angry Birds Epic. Instead, the party travels from battle to battle on a linear map, occasionally coming across treasure chests or resource deposits. The fights themselves play out like simplified, turn-based, JRPG battles in the vein of Paper Mario or the more recent South Park: The Stick of Truth, albeit without the cursing or focus on timed button presses.

The battles do have some depth, however. Using an intuitive touch system, each bird can either attack an enemy or use its special sub-skill. For example, the wizard’s lightning strike attack hits several foes at once. But it can also choose to create a lightning shield around itself or an ally that damages incoming foes. As the birds levels up, some skills can even be applied to the whole party.

Complimenting these strategies are the surprisingly complex skills of the enemy pigs. Some stronger pigs charge up attacks over time like meteor showers or taunts that cause all foes to target a specific vulnerable bird. Other enemies have more passive abilities like Prince Porky’s resistance to attacks above a certain damage level. When the red chili pepper at the bottom of the screen fills up, players can unleash a devastating special attack. However, it may be useless against bosses like Prince Porky or other shielded enemies so players still have to play smart.

These bite-sized battles make up the vast majority of the Angry Birds Epic experience, but there are a few things to do outside of combat. Players can forge stronger weapons, brew potions, and scrounge around for more loot. Aside from tackling the main campaign, players can also participate in daily dungeons and lottery spins for the chance to earn even more prizes. Partaking in these side activities strengthens the team and makes the story quest easier, but the fair yet steep difficulty curve definitely still feels designed to push players towards spending more money.

It’s hard to be too mad at the game though, because the world of Angry Birds Epic is so pleasing to take in. The colors are vibrant, the animation is exquisite, the music is joyfully rambunctious, and the whole presentation is so charming players will be reminded why so many people got hooked on this franchise to begin with. Like all things Angry Birds at this point, expect Angry Birds Epic to soar once it fully launches.

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9to5Mac has gotten the low-down on Rovio's newest Angry Birds title, Angry Birds Epic. And it seems as though it's not the sort of game we were expecting.

Rather than giving players something akin to Angry Birds in a medieval/fantasy setting, Angry Birds Epic is going to be a turn-based RPG with a crafting system of sorts. Color me intrigued. No, seriously, it sounds far more interesting than yet-another physics puzzle game.

Angry Birds Epic will be "soft launching" in Canada and Australia soon.

If you're obsessed with Angry Birds Go! then our pals at Pocket Gamer have just the site for you: The Angry Birds Go! Community.

This dedicated space for fans of the game to gather, meet, and even improve how they play the game is jam-packed with detailed toy guides, character profiles, strategy guides, achievement listings, community screenshots, fan art, and much more besides.

Best of all, it's a space that's shaped by you, the fans, giving everyone the opportunity to help build the greatest Angry Birds Go! site ever made.

So stop stalling, and race on over to The Angry Birds Go! Community now to see what everyone's talking about.

Makers of the two billion times downloaded Angry Birds series of games, Rovio, have announced via sister site Pocketgamer.biz that they are opening up a publishing division focusing on fun learning apps for kids 3-12. The goal being to take learning games in a whole new direction. Rovio is looking for developers in this space that can help them in this quest. The first chance to talk to them about it will be at our Big Indie Pitch event during GDC week in San Francisco.

"When kids are bored, their learning plummets," detailed the Finnish firm in a statement given to PocketGamer.biz.

"When they're engaged, anything's possible. So we're looking for new game ideas to entertain kids and motivate them to learn. Games that parents can also feel good about."

Today Rovio has pulled the curtain back on their latest project to reveal... another curtain. Angry Birds Stella is going to be a game set in some area of the Angry Birds world we've yet to see, and it's going to be spread out over several different forms of media. We're talking games, cartoons, toys, etc.

About the only other bit of info that can be gleaned from the announcement is that Rovio is trying to up the serious in this one. “Angry Birds Stella is breaking the mold by introducing strong, passionate characters who really stand for something, while adding plenty of action and reality into the mix," says Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio Entertainment, in the press release.

I dunno, it sounds kind of like The Real World: Angry Birds to me.

Amidst all the holiday sales and out-of-nowhere releases, it's important to remember that the App Store still picks one app or game out of the crowd to be featured as its App of the Week. And to get a price drop to zero dollars for the duration. This week, they've chosen Angry Birds Star Wars II.

In his review back in September, our own Blake Grundman said, "The Force is strong with this one. This IS the game we’re looking for." Seems like more than enough of a reason to check it out for free, right?

Rovio’s taking the Angry Birds out of the air and into... cars? Yes, it’s time for Rovio’s famous characters to make the natural leap for any popular character - star in a kart-racing game - with Angry Birds Go. While conceptually it makes perhaps a bit more sense than, say, Sonic the Hedgehog as the birds have generally needed the help of mechanical contraptions to get anywhere in the past, it’s still a bit silly on paper. However, what’s not silly business is that this is Rovio’s first free-to-play launch of an Angry Birds game, as this has been soft-launched in New Zealand ahead of a global launch. So, I take Angry Birds Go for a spin in this edition of It Came From New Zealand!

The racing has been tremendously simplified to where players really only need to concern themselves with steering, not even needing to brake, much less accelerate. Each racer has a special ability that helps them get to the finish line before their opponents, such as a floating bubble or a speed boost. Prepare to grind and become familiar with the game’s tracks. Each track has a variety of events to play on it, such as races, time trials, and a fruit smashing mode where points are earned for running into fruit strewn across the track. There goes the idea for a Fruit Ninja kart racing game, eh? Each event has a certain performance minimum, forcing players to upgrade and buy new cars.

The game steadily introduces the ways in which it intends on making money. First, there’s coins for upgrades. Then there are gems for boosts, though these can be collected in the game itself. There are IAP for better cars, including some rather expensive prices for the best ones. It’s possible to use Telepods to unlock cars, too. There’s an energy system where different racers must be used as their energies run low. Each racer has a different special ability, though the car stats remain the same.

Angry Birds Go feels like a highly-polished product right now, and it’s likely that how the game monetizes is what’s under major scrutiny here as it should be out in a couple of weeks. Just how free it is will take some time to see - and this game succeeding or failing could have a big impact on Rovio’s future releases as well. This should be an interesting one to keep an eye on.

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Angry Birds and Puzzle & Dragons! Angry Birds and Puzzle & Dragons!!! ANGRY BIRDS AND PUZZLE AND DRAGONS! OH MY! Yeah, sorry, anyway...

GungHo Online Entertainment, the publisher behind the rocking Puzzle & Dragons, announced that it'll be collaborating with Rovio Entertainment to bring an Angry Birds-themed event to their Puzzle & Dragons game. Starting Monday, November 18, and lasting until Sunday, December 1, fans will be able to enjoy the Angry Birds characters in a special dungeon event within Puzzle & Dragons.

“We are excited to announce the collaboration of Puzzle & Dragons and the Angry Birds games from Rovio Entertainment,” said Daisuke Yamamoto, Producer and creator of Puzzle & Dragons, in a press release. “Angry Birds is one of the most recognizable entertainment franchises in the world, and we are thrilled to be working alongside Rovio to give our fans a look at what it would be like if Angry Birds characters invaded the world of Puzzle & Dragons.”

Angry Birds Star Wars II comes flying in with a new update that adds 8 secret levels. Users must find hidden maps throughout in order to unlock the new secret levels. The levels also add 4 new characters which include Hologram Darth Sidious, Silver C3PO, Red Battle Droid, and Shadowtrooper.

Now go use the force to locate those secret levels!