Since Rovio slingshotted its way to fortune and fame with its Angry Birds franchise it has been stuck in a bit of a rut. Mind you, things have never been better for Angry Birds that still nets the game publisher a pretty tidy income - but they haven’t managed to follow up on that success with any other game franchise.
Now they are finally set to make an attempt, with their newly unveiled Amazing Alex game.
Remember Casey’s Contraptions?
Amazing Alex didn’t begin as Amazing Alex. In fact, he didn’t even begin at Rovio in the first place. The truth is that Amazing Alex is a re-imagining and re-branding of a previous title to appear on the Apple iOS store known as Casey’s Contraptions by developer Snappy Touch.
Unfortunately for Snappy Touch, despite getting some fairly positive reviews the game never really took off. Earlier in the year Rovio bought over the rights Casey’s Contraptions however, and set about revamping it and adding their own touches before finally unveiling it as Amazing Alex.
Playful Physics Puzzles and Games
The premise of Amazing Alex is much the same as Casey’s Contraptions: Players go through a variety of levels, solving physics puzzles along the way. With over 35 different unique objects such as vacuum cleaners, balloons, toy cars, and balls that you can place to solve the puzzles, it does offer a unique take on the physic puzzle genre of mobile games.
Being a physics puzzle game, the idea is to create chain reactions using the provided objects to accomplish certain tasks, such as cleaning up Alex’s room, or battling killer robots in his backyard.
One of the features that is bound to attract attention is the level editor that allows players to create their own levels, test them, and share those levels with their friends. This feature guarantees replayability for Amazing Alex, and also taps into the social front fairly well.
Cross-Promotion Expectations
Despite the fact that Rovio has made some significant changes to Casey’s Contraptions before relaunching it as Amazing Alex, they are hoping that their cross-promotion with the amazingly successful Angry Birds franchise is what will make the difference.
Already other games publishers such as Zynga are using this strategy, and Rovio is hoping that it will be able to follow suit.
Also, over 30% of the revenue that Rovio has made from Angry Birds comes from the sale of merchandise related to the game itself. If Amazing Alex proves to be anywhere near as successful, it would make sense that Rovio would attempt to follow the same model.
For now, you can download Amazing Alex for iPhone at $0.99, or the HD version for iPad at $2.99. Android users have a bit more choice, whereby they can get an ad-supported version of the game for free, or pay $0.99 for an ad-free version or $2.99 for an ad-free HD tablet version.
So far the response to Amazing Alex seems to be fairly upbeat, but it is still early days and only time will tell whether or not Rovio have another game franchise to sit side-by-side Angry Birds.
