Wow. I have so many grievances with the boss in level 520 that I don’t know where to begin. From what I can tell you’re basically hosed if you don’t have Matilda, because she’s the only one who can hit the boss after going through the yellow portal. Everyone else (including Silver because there isn’t enough room) just gets sucked into the gravity vortexes above and to the leftof the boss and ends up being useless. Even if you manage to knock the boss off of his perch, it just becomes another one of those “hope you have enough birds left to clear the next obstacle, and then the next one” exercise that I find extremely tedious and not at all mentally stimulating. Never mind the fact that the entire level is stacked against you to the point where you’re lucky to get there with even one bird left in the first place.
On one of my many tries this morning, I finally managed to get the boss into the “box” on the upper left of the screen. He had very little health left by that point and I figured I could pop the balloon immediately below and to the right of the slingshot to loosen the rocks, so that they would fall into the purple portal and finish him off. They proceeded to fly over his head and land in the corner because there were maybe one or two rocks already there between him and the left wall. That’s just poor level design – requiring the player to be super-precise in a situation where we don’t have the space or even really the means to change an object’s trajectory.
My last bird was (miraculously enough) another Matilda. I fired her through the portal, intending to drop an egg on the boss… and the egg drop didn’t respond. The boss had no visible red in his health bar at this point but was hanging on to life by a thin thread, and I was out of bird. I haven’t made it back to that point in easily ten tries since then. UGH!
This has been a glitch with Matilda for ages, including in several of the old AB games, and it needs to be fixed. You often need to be very precise with this bird, firing when you’re right up against the edge of a vertical structure or in some other tight spot, and there are just way too many instances of the game treating you like you’ve hit an obstacle even though you tapped below that point. The Star Wars games gave a little leeway, where you could use a bird’s ability a split second after hitting an obstacle, and having that margin for error greatly increased the enjoyment of playing those games for me. I don’t understand why AB2 brought back a glitch from the original AB despite completely overhauling the game otherwise. It seems like such a small thing, but it made a world of difference for me today.