The Angry Birds will be spitting feathers about this. A new app on the block is about to knock the world's most popular peckers off their perches – and their rivals are pigs. Badly behaved ones.

Bad Piggies is the latest mobile phone game app from the makers of Angry Birds, Rovio.

Boffins there have created the petulant porkies to compete with Angry Birds, which despite its enormous popularity – it has been downloaded over a billion times since it was launched three years ago - has started to show signs of losing its appeal.

The game once again features a cartoon-style physics-based environment. However, instead of launching birds out of catapults, players must construct vehicles out of a selection of parts to deliver the swine to a finish line, collecting stars along the way.

The original Angry Birds games attracted up to 200 million active players a month towards the end of 2011. But the latest instalment, Angry Birds Space, released earlier this year, showed signs that fans were beginning to tire of the franchise.

"When Angry Birds launched it rode the perfect storm of mobiles and tablets taking off," Jack Kent, senior analyst at IHS Screen Digest, told the BBC.

"It had a fantastic wave of word of mouth and celebrity endorsements."


Have you played Bad Piggies? Is it as addictive for kids and parents as Angry Birds?