Like many of my compatriots at The Verge, I felt a certain amount of trepidation towards Angry Birds Star Wars. I’m far from a dedicated fan of either franchise, but without context, the images of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker as humanoid birds seemed somewhere between tacky and downright creepy. It wouldn’t be the first time that Rovio had created a movie tie-in – that would be 2011’s fairly successful Angry Birds Rio – but the Star Wars franchise isn’t above misguided cash-grabs, and its elements range from critically acclaimed to universally loathed.

Thankfully, Angry Birds Star Wars is more the former than the latter, in no small part because its Force- and starfighter-based gameplay is genuinely addictive. But it’s also due to the game’s lighthearted reverence for its subject matter. Each section, for example, starts with a splash screen in which characters like a hulking Chewbacca-bird or a pig version of Darth Vader act out A New Hope. The pig-eared Death Star is suitably oppressive and bird-Han (obviously) shoots first, but you’re still watching cartoon animals pantomime a beloved series. And their creator, Jarrod Gecek, knows it. To him, Angry Birds Star Wars “takes itself seriously, but it doesn’t take itself seriously at all, you know?”