Angry Birds Transformers

Angry Birds Transformers is a side-scrolling shoot 'em up video game that is the tenth installment in the Angry Birds series, the game is a crossover between Angry Birds and Transformers, featuring battles between the Autobirds and Deceptihogs, Angry Birds versions of the Autobots and Decepticons. It is published by Rovio Entertainment with collaboration from Hasbro. The game was released on October 15, 2014, for iOS and on October 30, 2014, for Android. The release includes related licensed merchandise and a toy line from Hasbro. The game's catchphrase is "Birds Disguised as Robots in Disguise".

Plot
The EggSpark has landed on Piggy Island, transforming its dueling inhabitants and giving them bodies and powers based on the Transformers: the birds of the Flock become Autobirds and the Bad Piggies the Deceptihogs. The two sides briefly continue their struggle with these new powers until they are both threatened by another transformed group, the Eggbots, who seek to transform all of Piggy Island into metal, backed by countless robotized Minion Pigs.

Most of the Autobirds and all of the Deceptihogs are captured leaving only Red (who has the powers of Optimus Prime) free. The leader of the Flock (you know him well) heads out to free the Autobirds and Deceptihogs, for only by joining forces can they restore Piggy Island to normal!

Game Progression
Throughout the game, most of the levels will be randomly generated thanks in part to the Eggbots. Before the 2.0 update, the player would play as a character to get their necessary items to upgrade their characters (see items below)

Gameplay
The game is a deviation from the normal Angry Birds formula, but the core goal, toppling block towers to pop the Bad Piggies on them, is the same.

Once you select an available stage from the map of Piggy Island, your character runs along the foreground at a set speed, as block towers scroll by in the background. By tapping the screen, your character takes aim and fires their weapon. You can also hold-and-drag to fire in a spread (if the character's weapon isn't a single-shot blast), or press the "Auto" button to let the computer do the targeting for you (though it isn't very efficient). The trick is to quickly determine which blocks in the structure are best to destroy/shove to cause a domino effect, toppling them and popping the Piggies by dropping blocks on them or making them fall far enough. (Remember, weaker blocks are not always the best target!) You can also attack the Piggies directly; in fact, some characters specialize in this more direct approach!

Block types include: Each stage is also littered with cyberformed scenery with blinky lights that can be blasted to revert it to normal. Doing so sends an Energon cube hurtling towards the character. If the character is accompanied by an Energonicon, the cube is used to fuel its special power, activated by tapping the icon. If the character is an Energon variant then the character's health will go up about half a heart, at the cost of taking more damage. A full Energonicon cannot make use of extra cubes, so timely tapping to spend the energy before obtaining more is key. As your characters level up, they can store more Energon cubes, up to three, which generally extend the duration of the Energonicon's effects.
 * Ice Blocks: Very weak, easily shattered (1 Coin)
 * Wood Blocks: Fairly sturdy but not hard to break (2 Coins)
 * Stone Blocks: Very durable, better for pushing than breaking (3 Coins)
 * TNT Blocks: Easily-broken crates that explode with a considerable radius, sending blocks flying
 * Coin Blocks: Golden blocks that spit out Coins with every hit. Pretty dang sturdy, but if you destroy them, you earn a lot of Coins (50~250 Coins).

Most areas also have random destructible elements that can be blasted. The more destruction you cause, the more Coins you get to buy upgrades and explore new areas. Each level has a set length; you do not have to pop every Piggie to pass, merely survive to the end.

"Survive"? Yeah. Some Piggies are weaponized and will begin to attack shortly after appearing on-screen, even before you can retaliate. Thus, popping these Piggies (or at least upending them to throw off their aim) quickly becomes essential. You can also try to escape attacks and falling Monoliths by transforming to vehicle mode. This speeds you along a bit, but removes your ability to attack or call in partners, plus you can only maintain vehicle mode for a limited time. Attacking automatically transforms you back to robot mode. There are other obstacles that can decrease a character's health bar; lose all your life and the character is picked up by Astrotrain; you can then spend some Gems to immediately put them back into the fight, or let the timer run out and quit the level. If you quit, you will not earn Piggie points for the level, you do keep any Coins you collected. Health does not restore between levels, so if a character is low you must spend Coins to repair them. This takes them out of the game for a while, in real-time, even when the game is off. You can then repair them instantly by spending Gems, or you can skip all that and immediately restore them to full health instantly by watching an ad (up to 30 seconds long) or scanning their transformable figure (if they have one) with a Telepod.

New stages are unlocked by leveling up your characters, increasing your Rank one point with every level-up. Every 5 or 10 Rank settings lets you clear the clouds away from a new area of Piggy Island. The Caves can only be unlocked by using 10000 Plasma. Plasma can be unlocked by Challenge Events, Daily Quests, Daily Rewards, and Crates.

Cleared stages will slowly earn Coins over real-time. Tapping on the Coins on the map adds them to your bank. After a set point they will not accrue anymore: this threshold is about four hours of real time, the maximum amount hinging on how many character Squads you've completed. There are also randomly spawning treasure chests on the map, tap them to earn various amounts of Gems. However, roaming Eggbots will re-cyberform cleared stages, which removes their Coin bonuses. You can see which stages they are working on, how long the cyberforming process will take, and even interrupt their work (at the cost of Gems), giving you the chance to pelt an Eggbot in-level for extra Coins. Cyberforming too goes on in real-time. Once a stage is re-cyberformed, it can be played again. Note that merely peeking at an in-development will not automatically charge you Gems; you still have a choice to intercept or not.

Character Choices
Every stage has a pre-set character you control, based on who you've rescued so far. Every character has a different style of attack, movement speed, and armor rating. Working out the strengths and weaknesses of each character is key to high scores, and in some cases simple survival.

New characters can be added to your roster in a few different ways. In-game, a set of "starter" characters are held captive in ice blocks on the map, one per area, and you must "spend" a specific number of popped Piggies to break them out. You then have to play a short level with that character, and if they make it to the end, they're yours to keep. If not, they are re-frozen, but thankfully you can try again without having to spend all those hard-earned Piggy points again. There are also many, many other characters who can be unlocked via Space Bridge Missions (see below) or Challenge Events (also see below).

Out-of-game, this is where you can spend actual-factual money, on the tie-in toys. By placing one of the figures on a Telepod and placing that on your device's camera lens, the game reads the code on the figure and inserts it into the game for a limited amount of time (currently 24 hours). While the characters unlocked this way are only available temporarily until unlocked via Piggie points, there is no limit on how often you can scan the figure, plus any upgrade progress is saved. You can also use this method to power-up already-unlocked characters before a stage or speed up their repairs without spending Gems; again there is no limit to the number of times you can scan (but the effects will not stack). Every character can be upgraded multiple times (nominal maximum level for characters is 15, but they can be upgraded further than that in select Challenge Events) by spending Coins and Materials, which (of course) takes them out of play for a while. Each upgrade is pre-set, increasing attack strength, armor strength, or vehicle mode duration. At certain levels, their Energon capacity is increased, and these levels vary from character to character. You can spend much-rarer Gems to make the upgrade happen instantly; the closer the upgrades are to complete, the fewer Gems you need to spend. Upgrading characters is vital as the levels get harder and harder, not to mention in the phone version you can only unlock new areas with an overall player level, which is raised by upgrading your characters. This isn't the case in the tablet version where you can spend Gold Coins to unlock new areas. You can only have one character undergoing an upgrade at a time.
 * Improving characters

Characters can also be upgraded inside Astrotrain by customizing them with Accessories. These extra items cost Gems (or Tokens, see "Challenge Events" below) and not only alter the characters' appearance, but they boost stats, or imbue special abilities to weapons. One Accessory can be placed on a character's head, face, chest, arms and back each. Some Challenge Events have special exclusive Accessories you can't buy with Gems! As most Accessories are character-specific, see each character's page for more detailed information. A rare instance where a call-in buddy is a future character to be added.
 * Call-in Buddies

Soon you get the option to have a second character on standby, who you can call in and have the computer control for a brief period. They enter the stage in slow motion with a massive shockwave that does damage to most everything within the blast radius, obliterating Ice Blocks but only damaging tougher targets. These characters will warp out after a few seconds, then you must wait for their meter to re-charge before calling them back in. However, there's a limit to when you are able to call in a partner; once you see Astrotrain fly overhead, your partner's no longer available. On the other hand, the stage is close to over! But if your partner is already out when you hit that checkpoint, then they will stay active until the very end of the level, nice for really piling on the destruction.

You get to see your partner before you start the stage, and if you don't like that character choice, you can change it by spending some Coins. Partners are either randomly generated (which can let you see characters you haven't unlocked yet), or pulled from the character rosters of your friends if you've connected to the game via Facebook or Google+ or iTunes or whatever the social network stuff the kids are into these days is. If you called on them in the level, you can "thank" them afterward. Doing so gives the other player a nominal reward (either a Gem or 25 Coins), while not thanking them simply tells the other player that while you're grateful for the firepower assist, you don't think they deserve any actual compensation. You jerk. However this seems to be only for your friends if you use the social network support. When you don't have friends or don't believe in social media, you get random users to help, and if people use your characters and you're not friends with them via social network you don't get any rewards if they thank you.

Autobirds

 * Red as: Optimus Prime (Energon Optimus Prime, Ultimate Optimus Prime, Epic Optimus Prime, General Optimus Prime), Ultra Magnus (Major Ultra Magnus), Nemesis Prime (General Nemesis Prime), Blurr, Optimus Maximus


 * Chuck as: Bumblebee (High-Octane Bumblebee, Energon Bumblebee, Classic Bumblebee), Rodimus (Nemesis Hot Rod), Cliffjumper, Cosmos


 * Terence as: Heatwave, Sentinel Prime, Ratchet (Specialist Ratchet), Hound, Ironhide


 * Bubbles as: Jazz, Ricochet, Blaster, Sideswipe (Private Sideswipe), Red Alert (Private Red Alert), Sunstreaker, Mirage (Private Mirage)


 * Hal as: Grimlock (Grey Slam Grimlock, Energon Grimlock, Goldbite Grimlock), Volcanicus


 * Stella as: Arcee, Airachnid, Chromia (Sergeant Chromia), Novastar, Moonracer, Greenlight (Sergeant Greenlight)


 * The Blues as: Bluestreak, Prowl (Major Prowl), Smokescreen, Beachcomber


 * Silver as: Windblade (Energon Windblade), Elita One


 * Bomb as: Drift, Wheeljack, Grapple, Warpath, Omega Supreme (Captain Omega Supreme)


 * Matilda as: Nautica (Energon Nautica), Strongarm


 * Mighty Eagle as: Alpha Trion, Superion, Kup


 * Zeta as: Nightbird

Deceptihogs

 * Chef Pig as: Soundwave (Energon Soundwave, Major Soundwave) Soundblaster, Breakdown


 * King Pig as: Bludgeon, Brawl, Megatron (Ultimate Megatron, Dark Megatron, Energon Megatron, Lord Megatron), Shockwave (Energon Shockwave, Major Shockwave)


 * Foreman Pig as: Lockdown (Energon Lockdown), Dead End, Barricade (Sergeant Barricade)


 * Corporal Pig as: Galvatron (Energon Galvatron), Scorponok, Motormaster, Drag Strip, Menasor


 * Various Minion Pigs are: Thundercracker (Sergeant Thundercracker), Starscream (Energon Starscream, Captain Starscream) Acid Storm, Skywarp, Sunstorm, An unnamed Strikebot bomber, Devastator (Raider Devastator), Cyclonus, Ramjet, Thrust, Dirge, Ion Storm, Nova Storm


 * Hal as: Trypticon


 * Zeta as: Slipstream


 * Stella as: Flamewar (Sergeant Flamewar)


 * Bomb as: Private Deadlock


 * Astrotrain


 * Professor Pig

Eggbot Army

 * Minion Pigs as Various Eggbot Army Pigs
 * Eggbots
 * Boss Pig (Boss Bat Pig)
 * Unicron Pig
 * Walking Mortar Towers
 * Missile Silos
 * Monolith

Squads
Completing character Squads is the key to bigger earnings, in many different ways. The more Squads you have filled out, the higher the max number of Coins unoccupied map spaces can accrue. Also, any character from a completed Squad earns a 50% Coins bonus once they finish a level. Luckily, any Squads you complete will stay checked as complete even if new characters are later added to them, so you don't have to worry about losing bonuses with game updates.

During many Challenge Events (see below), you can earn bonuses to your Event scores by using a character from the suggested Squad. For a while the chosen Squad changed every four hours with (mostly) randomized percentages, but currently stays set at a single squad for the duration of the Event, with a x4 score multiplier if the character has been "Promoted". (If this sounds like it's kind of complicated, well, it is kind of complicated.)
 * Optimus Prime
 * Bumblebee
 * Heatwave
 * Ratchet


 * Optimus Prime
 * Bumblebee
 * Heatwave
 * Ratchet

Materials
Materials are special items earned by successfully completing stages, Missions, and Daily Quests, stored in the Silo. These are used to create Energonicons (and other prizes) at Professor Pig's lab, and to upgrade your characters.

The amount of Materials you can store is dictated by the level of the Silo. The Silo can be upgraded using Coins and Materials, which not only lets you store larger numbers and higher levels of Materials, but increases the number and rarity of Materials rewarded upon stage completion. Any Materials won that exceed the Silo's capacity are converted to Coins. The Silo's maximum level was 15, but a fall 2017 update increased the storage capacity to 25.

Space Bridge Missions
In addition to the stages, there are Space Bridge Missions that your freed characters can complete in order to earn Materials, Coins, Gems, or even new characters (Arcee, Airachnid, Prowl, and Bluestreak). There are three Space Bridges difficulties —Easy, Medium, and Hard— progressively unlocked by clearing more of the map of clouds. Each Space Bridge also has three Missions to choose from when open, with three different time requirements: the longer the Mission, the better the potential prizes.

Missions are "played" by selecting up to three characters from your available roster to participate. The Easy Bridge lets you send two characters for free, the other two only one, and sending any more requires Gem spending. Easy And Medium cost 100 Gems per extra character, and Hard 200, and given you might get back a grand total of 20 Gems even at the highest prize levels that is compltely not worth it. Characters who are taking part in Missions are basically gone for the duration, unable to be played in normal stages (and sometimes Challenge Events) until the Mission timer runs out. You can cut the Mission short by spending Gems.

Every Mission has a "type" icon: a light bulb (intelligence), a magnifying glass (investigation), or a missile (firepower), which helps the player determine which character would be most suited for completing it. The higher the level your character is at, the better the character is and the higher they'll score. Once you have your character(s) selected, you are able to use popped Pigs as "reinforcements" to lower the Mission timer to a minimum of half the original runtime (which can easily cost thousands of Pig points, but those are really easy to amass).

When the Mission is completed, the result screen bar fills up, earning you a key for every "level", up to five total (you always automatically get one key regardless of performance). You also (usually) have the option to watch an ad to earn one additional key. These keys are used to unlock the five prize boxes presented to you. The potential prizes are quickly shown before being wrapped in gift boxes and spun around randomly, thus you must blindly select a present and hope for the best. If you don't have enough keys to unlock all five prizes, you can spend Gems (because of course you can) to collect the remaining presents (10 for Easy, 20 for Medium, and 30 for Hard), but this is really only worth it for unlocking new characters or if you really really need that Super Rareium right now.

Given how many characters you can amass, this is a pretty simple way to gather Materials, tons of Coins, and even Gems over time with minimal effort.

Ads and upsells
Keep in mind the average, decent Accessory costs are roughly 400 Gems. Better ones 800~1000 or so.

It's a free game, so how does Rovio make its money? By copious amounts of ads (largely for other games) and by enticing you to spend real currency on in-game currency.

The ads can actually have a gameplay effect, in a disturbingly clever move. After completing any stage, you are given the option to watch a short video ad; doing so doubles your end-of-stage rewards. Similarly, when opening a Daily Reward, you can watch an ad to double the reward. Like we already said, upon completeing a Space Bridge Mission, you can watch an ad to obtain an extra key. When choosing a partner for a stage, you will also get a prompt to watch an ad; doing so gives your partner a one-stage stat boost and ups the amount of time they can stay in-play. However, you can only watch so many ads within a set amount of time, so choose which bonuses you go for wisely. You can also watch an ad to repair a character instantly; there does not appear to be any limit to this. And of course, ads may pop up anyway unless a purchase is made.

Spending real monies allows you to buy large numbers of Gems, which are used to buy Accessories, speed up character upgrades and repairs, interrupt the Eggbot terraforming to make a stage playable sooner, and about a billion other small things all over the game. Gem packages range from 150 for $4.49 US to 5200 for $99.99 which what the hell who even spends that much money on these things?! And considering that mere accessories, can run up to 1000 crystals, with most of the "buddy character" ones in the 850 range? Yeesh. From time to time there will be "sales" which either cut the prices down a bit or give you more Gems in each package, but come on.

Depending on who you ask, according to many reviewers, if you had to do a wipe or ever lose your files for some reason, you can lose all your progress. People have gotten their characters leveled up to the max. Which costs hundreds of thousands of gold coins or thousands of gems (read: lots and lots of grinding or real monies) only for it to be all for naught. But now that's not much of a problem since you can cloud save your progress with the Game Center on IOS or a Facebook account on Android.

Challenge Events
Starting in late 2015, the game introduced Challenge Events, five-to-ten-day-long themed events with the lure of prizes including unique unlockable characters and Accessories. While sparse at first, by mid-2016 events were popping up really frequently. Now it's continuous scheduled event after event.

Each day of an Event, the player is pit against 19 randomly-selected others at the same level (across the whole player base!) in a race to tally the most points within 24 hours by destroying as many of a specific object or enemy as possible in separate event stages. Entering a Challenge stage takes one "battery" of energy from the Challenge selection; the player starts with four, and spent batteries will recharge after an hour, one at a time. Of course you can spend Gems to speed up the process and instantly go back to four full batteries, but that cost increases every time: the first recharge costs 10 Gems, the next 20, then 40, 60, 80, then up to 100 for each recharge. Thankfully, that charge resets to the lowest amount each new day of the event.

In the earliest events, players could only take a single already-unlocked character and an Energonicon into the event with them. Eventually this changed, and depending on the event, you might be able to choose from your entire roster of unlocked characters, only certain members you've unlocked that match the event theme, or even "trial" characters you don't have yet who you can permanently unlock for the first time through the event you're playing there and now. Sometimes you can choose two characters and swap back and forth between the two (with a delay in recall time, of course). In some events, choosing characters from specific Teams and a specific Energonicon will add a percentage bonus to your final score, though given the potential dangers, one must take care to decide if the bonus is worth it if the bonus-giving characters aren't well-suited to taking out the target of choice for the day.

In 2017, the bonus scoring was changed to use "Sparks" won in Daily Challenges and awarded as Event prizes. By spending Sparks, you could "promote" a character, giving them an extra 5% bonus to your score per "rank" at the end of a run. Naturally, the higher the rank, the more Sparks you need. Selecting characters from the bonus Squad (which does not change for the duration of the event) gives them a multiplier to their Promotion bonuses, quadrupling the score.

Challenges are rewarded with Tokens, earned by reaching certain target milestones (milestones and prize amounts now vary from event to event), and according to your rank at the end of the 24-hour period (from 1000 to 100). These Tokens carry over from prior days' challenges up until the end of the promotion, and can be spent on prizes, including new characters, instant level-ups and accessories for select characters, Sparks, and Coins. Accessories are often less costly to obtain in Challenges than via normal Gem purchase. There is a 1-day token exchange period after each event ends, so some can spend the tokens they may have won from the final day's competition... and any new Tokens awarded through other means during the exchange period.

Originally, the milestones were consecutive 10 to 100. up to 550 tokens each day. Occasionally, mini-events give more token amounts than usual. But with the current token system, the maximum tokens possible per day are about 2000! But the final three milestones are impossible to reach without two highly-promoted characters of the same squad and/or hundreds and hundreds of gems!

Tokens are not currently able to be saved between different Challenge Events, but representatives from Rovio/Exient had raised it as a possibility, especially given how frequent the events have become. A year later, and they haven't done it, so pfffffft.
 * For a rundown of the history of Challenge Events, see Angry Birds Transformers (mobile game)/Challenge Events.

Achievements
Info not gotten out yet

Daily Quests
Starting in September 2016, the game added Daily Quests, which are like the normal Achievements, but on a much smaller scale. Every 24 hours (starting at midnight via the clock on the player's device), eight randomized Quests are opened up, each earning a small prize for completion.

Quests can range from simple stuff like visiting a certain area so many times, destroying enough Pigs or blocks, creating enough items at the Lab, etc, to more difficult feats like pulling off enough slow-mo Monolith dodges, entering Astrotrain while scrambled, or racking up enough damage while in fast-forward at the Cobalt Plateaus. The prizes are similarly random, with Pig Points, Coins, Gems, Materials, and even Tokens (only during Challenge Events) available.

There is also a ninth Quest with a four-part prize, earned only by completing all eight other Quests within the 24 hours.

With the introduction of Sparks, many quests were dropped completely, and others made to appear less frequently. Currently, these Daily Quests are always in the mix: The final prize is always a generous 10 gems, 250 pigs, 15000 coins, and 500 400 spark.
 * Visit the Pig lab and craft something
 * Open 5 Crates
 * Visit Shockwave's Spire
 * Thank 3 buddies after events
 * Collect 30 Energon cubes
 * Pop 300 of any type of Pig

Jenga stage
Down at the beach, there's the Jenga stage, shaped like the large Grimlock Bird Jenga toy that you could buy in stores. This mini-game remains locked until you use an unlocking code found in any of the Angry Birds Transformers Jenga toys.

Once open, this stage is a fair bit different. First you pick a Driver and a Gunner from a fixed set of characters (unaffected by who you have unlocked or away on Missions or upgrading). The Driver then travels along a path, gathering free-floating Coins and smashing through block towers. There are holes in the path, so sometimes you need to hit the turbo button for a burst of speed to carry you over. The turbo boost will drain quickly, so overuse can leave you dry when the big jump comes up. The goal is to gather as many coins and clear out as many blocks as possible and make it to the end for a higher score. Falling into a pit doesn't end the level, it just ends the Driver's turn and makes the Gunner's turn that little bit more difficult.

The Gunner then runs through a different path further out, and their job is to clear out as many blocks from inside the giant Grimlock Bird frame with their firepower. Naturally, this is easier if the Driver has cleared out the block towers that stood between the Gunner path and the frame. The more blocks that are destroyed or at least knocked completely out of the frame, the higher your score.

So why do this? Your Jenga scores accumulate over the course of 24 hours, and reaching 300 points nets you a prize. Often this is just a sum of Coins, no big whoop. But it's worth checking back every day, because the prize changes every 24 hours, and sometimes it's a small cache of Gems. Spending five minutes to get 10 Gems isn't bad, given how stingy the game can be with giving away the premium currency. Also, what happens in Jenga mode counts towards your Daily Quests: every mile you walk or drive, every block you smash, and every time you finish the "event". It can be a very quick way to knock out a couple of Quests at no cost other than a few minutes' time.

Bumblebee seems to be the best choice for the Driver, while Bludgeon works best as the Gunner thanks to his wide multi-shot cannon, though characters with rapid-fire attacks can really clean up if they can equip explosive rounds (like Energon Starscream). The available characters in Jenga mode have changed over the course of the game, eliminating certain characters whose weapons are designed for easy mass block destruction.

Sparkrun
Introduced March 2017, the Sparkrun lets you earn Spark (Only Spark; you don't earn any pigs or coins in this mode) by destroying everything you can in a special extra-long stage that goes through five random areas, with transitions through caves. You select three characters, and should your first 'bot go down, the next one you selected takes his place. You can also use a random character specially power-boosted for the Sparkrun. Promoted characters can also be used to increase the final score, which you'll need as they may not be enough stuff to get all the Spark in the level alone. Earn enough spark and the next difficulty level will be unlocked, each level adding 10 additional Spark to the initial 100, and increasing the damage of offensive pigs.

Gold blocks give the most amount of spark points, so be sure to destroy all of them!

Watch out for pigs with special buffs, like those that deal painfully more damage, regenerate health, shielded pigs immune to small arms fire, fast pigs, and health buffed pigs!

The Sparkrun can be played once a day, but can be reactivated for 100 gems.

As of a June 2017 update, many improvements were made. All enemies and missiles now give points when before only ground pigs and blocks gave points. Spark scoring has been rebalanced, making it easier to earn the max amount of Spark in higher difficulties. A fourth character slot can be unlocked for 1000 gems. And more importantly, the game is much, much less likely to crash in the middle of a Sparkrun. However, as players continued to advance in the game and "max" out their team of four characters at full promotion (140% x4) they realized the maximum difficulty in Sparkrun ended at 160. It was not possible to advance beyond difficulty 160 and the maximum reward of 1690 Sparks were incredibly rare to obtain due to the limited number of points that could be scored (the 5 levels in a Sparkrun course + the interconnecting caverns were completely random).

In a February 2018 update, a fifth character slot was added and available to be unlocked (permanently) for 2500 gems. The difficult ceiling was again raised beyond the previous maximum (160) with increasing Spark rewards. In the same update, the maximum promotion of characters were also raised (increased from 140% to 175%) which made it possible to once again score enough points to obtain the max Sparks available in a single Sparkrun.

Crates
In a September 2017 update, Crates were introduced which give various prizes, which fall under five rarities. Steel Crates give common, uncommon, or rare prizes that can be claimed for free every 24 hours or purchased for 15000 coins each; finally something to spend the coins you've stockpiled in the millions on. Opening ten at a time gives a guaranteed Rare prize. Gold Crates can give rare, epic, or legendary prizes, and can be purchased for 200 Gems each. Opening ten at a time is 5% off and gives a guaranteed epic prize.

Some of the possible prizes by rartiy: Speaking of accessories, this update revamps the accessory system; Gem costs are significantly reduced, although this means token costs of accessories in Challenge Events is double the gem cost. New accessories are introduced (and old accessories from waaay back in 2014 are re-introduced). Accessories have five ratings, and can be unlocked or upgraded from crates.
 * Common: Coins, 1-star accessory, Pigs, Tokens (~30~), Gems (2-3), Materials
 * Uncommon: Coins, Materials
 * Rare: Coins(~14500~), Spark, Tokens, 2~3-star Accessory upgrade
 * Epic: 3-star accessory, 3-star accessory upgrade, Gems (~200~)
 * Legendary: Instant upgrade, new Bot

Shockwave's Spire
Thought opening Gold Crates was a gamble? Well this new feature introduced December 2017 is really a gamble! Shockwave's Spire is essentially the same as Angry Birds 2's Tower of Fortune. There are several floors that each have four cards from which you pick one and get various prizes. The higher you go, the better the prizes and higher the rarity, all the way to legendary prizes at floor 90! And a guaranteed accessory every 5 floors! You can exit anytime and claim the prizes in the stash. But if you pick a pig card, you will lose them all! Unless you pay gems to keep playing. The gem cost will naturally increase significantly each time you make a gambling blunder.

Once you exit, Shockwave's Spire will not be available to play again (not even gem skips!) until the next day.

Be careful not to form certain habits and throw in way too many gems (and money).

Transformers References
This game is loaded with tiny jokes and references to Transformers lore.
 * The character designs pull from a broad mix of generations. While (obviously) Generation 1 gets the most representation, there are also elements from the live-action movies, Rescue Bots and War for Cybertron. Each character also has a number of wearable accessories, many of which are based on wider Transformers lore. (See individual character pages for the rundown on each.)
 * The initial loading screen has numerous nods to more specific (and occasionally obscure) bits of Transformers lore:
 * "Crowning Grimlock"
 * "Rhyming with Wheelie"
 * "Targeting 2006"
 * "Seeing if we've got The Touch"
 * "Dueling on dams"
 * "Rebuilding Guardian"
 * "Hailing Megatron"
 * "Pouring water on scraplets"
 * "Practicing Metallikato"
 * "Crashing the Ark"
 * "Rebooting Teletraan 1"
 * "Spying on Soundwave"
 * "Unlocking Lockdown"
 * "Having a taste of our own electro-medicine"
 * "Satisfying logic circuits"
 * "Enjoying hospitality of Sub-Atlantica"
 * "Detecting a rat named Megatron"
 * "Thanking the Eggspark for hot, brown water"
 * "Trying out Jet Judo"
 * "De-stinging the Stinger"
 * "Transforming Jazz. Fiddly!"


 * The music for the game was composed by Vince DiCola (with Kenny Meriedeth), who did the score for The Transformers: The Movie.
 * Pig City events have Soundwave lamposts and purple Cybertronian shuttles strewn all over the level that can be easily destroyed.
 * The game pokes into the gag of the FIR RIB/FIB RIR treatment. In this case, Frenzy is red and Rumble is blue.
 * On that, Frenzy is not partnered with Soundwave, but instead Barricade, which is a reference to the 2007 movie.
 * The (removed) building for friend activity resembles Fortress Maximus's city mode. But it returned in a different location as the new Sparkrun mode.
 * Most of the accessories to the characters are based on different characters, items, and tools from different continuities.