Flappy Bird review: it’s frustrating, dumb, and ridiculously addictive

In Flappy Bird players have to fly a stone-faced bird through as many Super Mario-esque green tubes as possible before they crash and die.

Sounds easy, right? It isn’t. My high score is nine. For a long time, it was zero. Flappy Bird is frustrating, but it has kept people stabbing at such a frantic rate that it went viral, globally, over the weekend.

Achieving a certain high score (not that I did, though) awards users with a little silver Flappy Bird medal that does nothing except testify to your dogged dedication for the game.

Vietnam’s .GEARS Studios pixel art offering brings little else to the table but a coloured bird’s mocking, deadpan face flying through the sky. There are absolutely no in-app purchases, not even a different bird avatar, and after every other game, you will be prompted to let the app to publish on your Google+ account. There’s also a leaderboard which requires you give the app posting permissions before access, and a little button to rate the game.

Flappy Bird is so simple it can barely be graded by our site’s review rubrics. I’m not sure it even deserves to. Yet it achieved what many modern, triple A games have failed to: it has kept people playing.

No in game screenshot because it’s impossible.