Rovio, the Finnish video game company that gave us Angry Birds, has officially run out of ideas for this franchise, and that probably won't fly with its 1.7 billion fans.

How fitting that this should become evident during this week, when the eyes of the video game world are locked on Los Angeles for the annual Electronics Entertainment Expo, or E3. All the latest consoles and games, which were supposedly living on borrowed time due to the last five years of surging mobile game popularity, are still getting plenty of attention. In some cases, like Microsoft's HoloLens/Minecraft virtual reality mashup that was demonstrated during the Xbox presentation on Monday, the enthusiasm for the innovation on display nearly blew up Twitter. Meanwhile, the gaming studios that make Halo 5, Gears of War and Rise of the Tomb Raider are all coming back with new editions of these popular franchises.

And Rovio? It appears to have gone all the way back to 2013 and Candy Crush Saga for the inspiration to come up with Angry Birds Fight!

This 13th title of the Angry Birds brand no longer involves flying birds taking out big green pigs and the stone/wood/glass structures that they live in. You don't even play it horizontally like every other Angry Birds. Instead, you play a timed match-3 game to collect points for your bird character, then you stand by helplessly as it uses those points to fight another player in real time that Rovio has found for you via its matching system.

There are role-playing elements tacked on; coins, gems and experience won through battle will help your bird character - be it Red, Chuck, the Blues or the Bomb - level up while enhancing their weapons and armor. All of this is designed to tap into the rapid puzzle-solving that made Candy Crush and its countless imitators popular among smartphone and tablet players. All it did for me, however, is make me wistful for the very first time I sent a big round red bird soaring towards an ugly, grinning cartoon pig and immediately became addicted to the fun, funky physics of Angry Birds.

No game, whether Angry Birds Space, Star Wars, Rio or Seasons, was complete until I had scored three stars on every level. But it was clear by the time Angry Birds Mario Kart Go! came out that Rovio was desperately casting about to achieve the same levels of downloadable success for the franchise.

The company announced late last year that Angry Birds had been downloaded 2.5 billion times and was on 1.7 billion smartphones since its 2009 launch. That initial success, which included tons of kid-friendly merchandise and talk of Angry Birds movies and theme parks, started analysts discussing the possibility that expensive consoles and shrink-wrapped games could be threatened by free-to-play games instantly sent to your favorite mobile device.

Relying on just one game for your revenue, however, points to the potential problems for all mobile game makers, according to Jeff Hillmire, CEO of Atlanta-based mobile gaming company Dragon Army. "It's not so much studio driven as it is title-driven," he told me in a recent interview. "You're seeing that with Rovio, which had a tremendous couple of years there with the Angry Birds franchise, but they haven't been able to do much past Angry Birds, and so they had people laid off at the beginning of this year."

It's still just a week into its launch, but so far Angry Birds Fight! isn't approaching the addictive qualities of Candy Crush. It's a cool idea to match players in real-time on your phone, and so far I've played gamers from China, Russia, Great Britain and Japan. But the matching mechanism sometimes fails, and there doesn't seem to be much thought given to matching players whose birds have similar abilities and levels. My Red is on level 10, and I'm sending him into battle against a Bomb Bird who is at level 108?

It's not that the match-3 system doesn't make for good gameplay; the many fans of Candy Crush will attest to that. The Godzilla Smash3 game that came out in conjunction with the 2014 movie offered a nice twist on the matching-symbols concept. But Angry Birds Fight! veers too far off the flight path of what made this particular franchise fun to play.

Besides, if Rovio is going to mimic competitors to try and keep this brand alive, then it should add a mockingbird to its flock of characters.