Flying Bird Deluxe review: Singapore and China's Flappy Bird clone of choice

You all know what Flappy Bird is. You’ve probably also noticed that we more or less stopped covering it, in part because of creator Dong Ngyuen’s wishes and in part because I was getting sick of it.

Unfortunately, I can’t in good conscience ignore the success of Flying Bird Deluxe, an HD clone of Flappy Bird for iOS by developer Chen Hongwei. Flying Bird Deluxe has, since its February 25 launch, sort of taken Asian iOS users by storm. The game quickly shot into China’s top ten charts for apps, games, and puzzle games, and is approaching the top ten in Singapore as well (thus far it has peaked at number 15 on the puzzle charts there).

You may think you know whether or not you want this already. But I’ve decided to review the game anyway, because it has a dark, disturbing secret that you really ought to know about.

What is wrong with this bird?

Flying Bird Deluxe may seem, on its face, to be a pretty direct copy of Flappy Bird that’s a cynical, ad-bloated attempt at cashing in on someone else’s success. But if you look deeper, the high-definition textures of this re-skinned iOS game ask more sobering questions. This is not a puzzle game. It is part snuff film and part murder mystery; part ornithology and part psychology.

The first thing you’ll notice on booting up Flying Bird Deluxe is that the birds look exhausted. Even before the game begins, it’s clear that these animals have been flying for far longer than they want to. And indeed once you start playing, the gameplay belies this fact. A bird will only flap its wings when you tap it; if left to its own devices every single bird in the game will immediately plummet to the ground (and its own death).

As you play, you’ll begin to feel a bit like a man with a whip, violently abusing a tired horse as it struggles to move forward. And as you look more closely at the game, you’ll begin to notice even more troubling signs.

Let’s begin with the bird itself. In the original Flappy Bird, large pixels obscured most of the bird’s anatomy, but the birds in Flying Bird Deluxe are quite clear, and they were clearly never meant to fly. Look at the size of their wings! As we all know, the lift that wings generate during flight is proportional to their area; the heavier the object, the larger the wings needed to propel it. There’s no way for us to know exactly how heavy Flying Bird‘s titular birds are, but given their minuscule wingspans they would need to be made of mostly helium for their tiny wings have have much hope of generating lift.

If you look more closely at the bird’s expression, psychological issues are also apparent. This is most easily observable when a bird, after being tapped and flapping its wings once, begins to nosedive towards the ground. Observe this enhanced image; I think it speaks volumes about the birds’ psychological condition:

Are these birds depressed to the point of being suicidal? I’m not a digital bird psychologist, so I can’t be sure of the answer to that. However, the answer is yes.

More questions arise if your conscience can bear tap-whipping your bird far enough that it is forced to fly through an increasingly-difficult series of gaps between green pipes protruding from the earth and the sky. The first question: why can the birds not simply circumnavigate these pipes? Have they lost the ability to move in three-dimensional space? And if so, can what they’re doing even truly be called flying? Or are they simply being held to their pipe-smashing path by some kind of artificial construct?