If you’ve never heard of Flappy Bird, get easily frustrated with games, or have twitchy fingers, I’d suggest you move onto the next article. For the rest of you, I’m sure you are sick to death of hearing about Flappy Bird’s crazy rise to fame, but with countless clones of the game clogging the App Store it’s kind of hard to ignore completely (a search for “Flappy” gets 500 results). Even Apple and Google got tired of all the copy-cats. I myself get frustrated with the game (I’ve only made it through 9 sets of pipes argh), but not to the extremes that many people did. In fact, the frustration has the positive effect of keeping me from playing it too long.
Besides the video above, I also find amusement in looking through all the current variations of the game that people have come up with. There is everything from switching the eponymous bird with flying pigs, airplanes, fish, mustaches, and even Miley Cyrus. Some are kind of clever with their themes or gameplay, but some are just so stupid they make you laugh. Of the ones I’ve tried so far, Flappy Wings seems to keep the simplicity and control response of the original app, while also adding some potentially fun features.
So, your basic Flappy game has you navigating between pipes by tapping the screen to make your bird/pig/mustache gain some altitude without running into things. Harder than it sounds. First, Flappy Wings (FW from here on) adds a music score which keeps things more lively than the flapping and dying sound effects. The only problem with it currently is that it is too repetitive, but this could be remedied by lengthening the loop a bit. Fortunately, there is a button to turn it off. You also have the added motivation of collecting coins as you pass through the pipes. Once you rack up some coins, you can go into the FW store and buy a variety of hats with which to adorn your avian friend. I think this could be expanded to include purchasing different sceneries, different music, or different flappy “things”.
Your bird already changes colors in-between attempts, so that doesn’t need to be in the store. The game also adds achievement badges in Game Center, none of which I’ve managed to unlock yet. The last items are simply background effects that occur randomly. Occasionally your birdy will open its beak and chirp, which is cute I suppose, but the second thing it does is…well…perplexing? Another random effect is that your bird will poop, complete with sound effect, not to hit anything, or if you do anything special, just poop. For some reason it bugs me that it is brown instead of the typical white of most real birds. Also, for no apparent reason, it will occasionally pop out a gold nugget (I think) instead of the brown stuff. The picture seems to indicate it might poop diamonds and other stuff. Man, I haven’t used the word “poop” this much for a long time…at least a couple weeks. As far as I can tell, the only effect this has is to occasionally make me bust out a laugh, and maybe that’s its purpose, to keep your blood pressure down so you don’t throw your phone across the room.
As a score, I’d rate this 2 ½ out of 4 “bolts”.
So, if you miss the heart-pounding, teeth-gritting excitement of the original, but need that little extra thing to liven up your obsession, give Flappy Wings a spin…or flap.