YMMV / Angry Birds 2

• Awesome Art: The game does a pretty stellar job at replicating the art and animation of the Toons series, with the bouncy and fluid animations of the birds and pigs, expressive characters, vibrant lighting, etc. It is especially impressive when judging it by the standards of a mobile game, a market where this trope is often an afterthought.
• Awesome Music: Pretty much the whole soundtrack. Particularly the level themes, which are very bouncy and energetic all around. Special mentions go to Chirp Valley Rumble, Piggy Dilly Circus, Mount Pork, and ESPECIALLY the boss theme; Fight and Flight.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Even with a 2022 update to fully customize the flock, almost all players have Terrence and Bomb in their load-out. Terrence's sheer strength allows him to be a premier demolitionist, and his sheer weight lets him cleave through several smaller buildings, potentially soloing an entire level. Bomb meanwhile is excellent at weakening the foundations of larger structures, allowing him to cause a lot of collateral damage in the process.
• Contested Sequel: While the game has received praise for its graphics and soundtrack, the series going into freemium territory thanks to the growth of the model in mid 2013 with a lives system, as well as the randomly-generated levels, has turned off some would-be players, even fans of the original games.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Most of the offensive pigs such as construction pigs & winter pigs, could be considered as ones, but the polymorph pigs with the purple wands were quite possibly the most infuriating element of the game due to their ability to turn your bird into a random object or even outright disintegrate it, which made some stages very difficult to complete, especially if they featured two or more of these pigs. Fortunately, they were nerfed in late 2016 so that they were far more likely to turn your bird into something useful such as a TNT crate, rocket, or even a Golden Pig (although that's still fairly rare).
  • Parasol pigs are also quite annoying since their umbrella protects them from stuff falling on them, and allows them to survive a fall by gliding down. More often than not, they are placed on the top of structures, so when the structure collapses, they float down and don’t pop, forcing you to waste an extra bird to pop them.
  • The aforementioned construction pigs, should a bird get in the range of one, can throw a screwdriver and incapacitate a bird in one hit (and usually even stop it mid-air, causing it to fall down and lose all momentum). The firefighter pigs are even worse, which do the same thing but instead cause the bird to burn and disappear completely. It also not help that their projectiles are moving at faster pace in comparison, thus making it almost impossible for your birds to dodge them. The winter pigs can be this to a lesser extent, since their snowballs are fired in an arc every few seconds and thus allow for proper timing.
  • The magician pigs. While they don't do anything to the bird, they can teleport if it gets close. Sometimes they may teleport somewhere you can easily get them or to a location that kills them (such as above a trampoline at an angle, or on top of a structure piece that causes them to roll down), but other times they can end up somewhere hard or impossible to reach. Not to mention that they just waste your ammunition whenever you somehow manage to pop all but these specific pigs, forcing you to fling another bird or spell.
  • Balloon pigs, like magician pigs, don’t do anything to birds, but if they somehow manage to survive the first bird, they will inflate a balloon that carries them out of reach of anything happening below, forcing you to waste another bird to get them. Though this is nullified somewhat by the fact that they can be placed on parts of structures that immediately pop the balloon when they try to use it, and by the fact that they only do it after the first bird is launched, which means that you don’t need to worry about them if you get them on the first shot.
  • Scuba pigs and floaty pigs, unlike other pigs, don’t drown in water and are often placed in parts of the level that are nearly impossible to get to.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Like Candy Crush Saga, you can advance the time to refill your lives in order to continue playing.
  • Hal (see Rescued from the Scrappy Heap) has gone from the worst bird in the flock to one of the most powerful, since his ability can be activated after he hits something, and, if timed correctly, can destroy not just the entire castle, but the rest of the stage.
  • To promote The Angry Birds Movie 2, Leonard was added as a playable character, and is pretty powerful too. He can shoot 3 balls of snot at towers, and they cause blocks to become rather slippery as well as instakill pigs, activate TNT, and send bosses flying. In addition, Leonard himself also makes a snot explosion when he collides with something, which is much bigger than the snot balls.
  • Melody, introduced in the November 2022 update. She has the ability to inhale blocks, pigs, TNT, and almost any other destructible object, then spit them out in any direction. This makes her an incredibly versatile and powerful bird, as she's able to both take out even the sturdiest structures with little effort and attack almost any spot on the screen.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Almost nobody seems to enjoy using Silver, as all of her supposed strengths are outdone by other birds. Need a strong bird to deal with stone structures, Bomb's explosion or Terence's sheer strength can deal with that material much more efficiently than Silver's dive bomb. Need someone with burst movement to reach higher areas, Chuck's speed boost is both more intuitive to aim, and not prone to whiffing if he brushes even a small piece of debris. Even her unique niche of being a bird that attacks straight down is outclassed, as Matilda's egg bomb is both easier to aim, and has a higher damage potential due to both the explosion from the egg itself and the attack's recoil causing Matilda to launch upwards and potentially attack more structures. Even compared to the other technical birds like Hal, Leonard, and Melody, Silver's skill curve is considered too steep to justify her potential power. When an update in 2022 came that allowed players to fully customize their flock's loadout, Silver would likely be the first bird to be benched to make way for more useful flock members.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Red was one of the worst birds in the original game, being a very basic bird with no special abilities who found himself unable to stand out next to the more powerful and specialized birds, especially Bomb. This game gives Red an actual ability in the form of a battle cry which can topple structures and push around pigs, making him a decently useful bird that's able to be effective in a wide range of situations, fittingly for the series protagonist.
  • In the original games, Hal was considered the worst bird of the flock due to his boomerang attack being considered quite awkward to aim. When he returned for this game, Hal gained several substantial buffs to make him much more viable. The first notable buff is his signature boomerang attack gaining the ability to work even after he collides with something, meaning the player has increased control over him. The other major buff was an increase to his weight, going from only decently breaking wood to being able to shatter stone with some proper shots. These two buffs, when combined, gives Hal the ability to slice through even the sturdiest structures like butter, with the potential to even outclass Terence in terms of raw destruction. Due to this, Hal went from being considered a situational bird to becoming one of the most powerful members of the flock with the right shot.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The life system. Unlike the original games, where you had unlimited lives, this game requires you to either wait 30 minutes for them to refill or pay up for more.
  • The Hatchlings, which have been added since the May 2018 update. They need to be fed apples every day, and if you fail to feed them 48 hours after the last feed, you'll have one more hour to feed them before they leave, causing your multiplier to be reset. Also, you cannot turn them off, and they require more apples as they level up. This can be a problem if you take a long time to win apples in each level and you don't have enough to feed them.
• That One Level:
  • Just about any level with six or seven stages, especially if there's a boss pig at the end that requires you to have three or four birds left over just to get it to budge from its spot. Curiously, due to the semi-random generation of structures in each level, it's quite possible for a level to be deceptively easy the first time through and then seem damn near impossible when you replay it later.
  • Mount Pork, which is tied to clan events and Mighty Eagle's Bootcamp, can get pretty difficult due to the way it's structured; it features stalactites and stalagmites which can inhibit your progress (e.g. they may get in the way of the bird coupled with the limited launch arc range, or pigs could get wedged between stalagmites which can deprive you of ammo or even end your game if none of your available birds can reach them), and there are also pig-shaped machines that spit out rocks (either small or big) that are activated through striking their designated crystal located elsewhere in the room - and sometimes these crystals are not easy to reach and/or breaking the pig structures is dependent on activating the rock-spitting machines and getting lucky with the rocks it spits out. While it does feature lava which can be very helpful (it sets the birds of fire and allows them to create an explosion upon collision), sometimes the room's structure disallows proper usage of it (e.g. a little lava pool next to the slingshot that doesn't offer enough space for a collision-free launch arc).
  • Level 8 of the temporary event "The Enchanted Adventure" in 2021. On top of basically requiring that you own the entirety of the respective hat set to get the best possible chance, this 5-room level is very hard to beat; the room layouts are difficult if not impossible to clear using only one bird, and your shots have to be deliberate, accurate, and lucky with the ensuing physics if you hope to have enough birds left by the time you reach the last room (assuming you clear all the others to begin with). Even just one misplaced or not-lucky-enough fling may leave you one bird short in the last room, which can (and will) make a difference. Making things even harder is that the extra birds (Stella, Bubbles, Hal and Leonard) aren't available, rooms can't be rewound, the deck can't be shuffled to get new bird choices, and you can't buy extra cards with gems if you run out before you can beat the level.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Angry Birds 2 was hit hard by this thanks to the usage of a Candy Crush Saga-style Freemium Timer in the form of the "life" system. If you played the game enough times to drain your lives, the game locks you out and makes you either wait a long time for it to refill, or pay up to buy more lives, which upset many players. Making matters worse was the amount of lives accidentally changing from 5 to 3 during the Pigsyland updates.
  • Even worse: according to a Periscope Q&A session, creative director Patrick Liu outright said that the lives system is used to stop the player from getting too addicted to the game, and that said system was also popular in the Free-to-Play industry (in part thanks to the massive boom the aforementioned Candy Crush Saga made in the mobile market).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: See for yourself.

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