Angry Birds Star Wars trailer proves predictable, yet enticing

Angry Birds Star Wars officially arrives on November 8, and to herald its debut Rovio has issued a gameplay trailer that is pretty much exactly what you'd expect based on the game's title. Luckily, that's not a bad thing.

When you first heard about Angry Birds Star Wars, what did you immediately imagine? Well yes, obviously George Lucas accepting huge bags of cash for the Star Wars licensing rights, but after that what did you come up with? A game largely akin to existing Angry Birds titles, except with lightsabers and force powers in place of the traditional suite of avian superpowers this franchise normally showcases? Perhaps a handful of sound effects seemingly ripped straight from the Star Wars films themselves? An overall sense that while this marriage of two disparate intellectual properties may make sense financially, it also holds the potential to devalue both IPs in the eyes of devoted fans?

Assuming you came up with any of those things, congrats on being so prescient! As you can see from the footage embedded below, the first official trailer for Angry Birds Star Wars features all of these things. Normally being so predictable would be a knock against an upcoming title, but in this case the game looks rather entertaining. Launching the birds seems to be as simple as it’s ever been, but those new Star Wars powers should open a wealth of strategies for beating each level. If nothing else, deflecting laser blasts with a lightsaber while flying through the air is a pretty novel addition to the Angry Birds series.

The big question remaining after viewing this trailer is whether or not the game’s level design can properly take advantage of all the new gameplay quirks added for this latest Angry Birds iteration. Those new abilities mean that new, specially-designed stages have to be built, and while we have little doubt of Rovio’s ability to craft endless reams of fun levels, we can’t really comment on that aspect of Angry Birds Star Wars until after we’ve played the title. Luckily the wait for this game’s debut is a short one: Angry Birds Star Wars arrives on almost every computer and mobile phone platform in existence on November 8. If history is anything to go by, we’ll see it appear on every other possible gaming platform shortly thereafter.