Swing Copters review: is Dong Nguyen a one hit wonder?

Swing Copters is the highly-anticipated new game from Dong Nguyen, the creator of Flappy Bird. It hit the app stores today, and already has four clones (some outright copies) on Google Play. But is Swing Copters really as good as its predecessor?

The fast and simple answer is no. The more detailed and equally simple answer is: Swing Copters plays off the one-button mechanic popularized by Flappy Bird, sends the game’s little helicoptor man upwards instead of forward, and tries to outdo Flappy Bird’s terrifying difficulty without success.

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

The first blunder in Swing Copters is its lack of instructions. Gameplay in Flappy Bird was simple, and simply explained by the word “tap”; this is not the case in Swing Copters. The same “tap” explanation flashes on screen before you start, but you’ll soon find that tapping to start immediately sends your little ‘copter listing into the wall, while tapping multiple times helps get him airborne for all of two seconds.

It’s then that you’ll realize that what Dong meant by “tap” was actually “tap where you want your helicopter dude to go”.

In a nutshell, Swing Copters is pretty much Flappy Bird turned vertical, albeit lacking the intuitive gameplay the latter suggested. While the pixel-art visuals and sound effects are on-par with their predecessor’s, I can’t help but feel like Dong Nguyen is a one-hit wonder. Nothing else has been improved on except an addition to remove ads for a dollar. There are no achievements, no goals, and no real purpose to the game, other than to rise up as high as possible.

(See: 10 reasons why the Vietnam-made Flappy Bird is so ridiculously addictive)

Flappy Bird was amazing in the sense that the world has never before seen such an addictive waste of time. It beat all the cats on the internet hands down, and gave you a medal when you got a high enough score. Swing Copters just replicates all of its gameplay but in a vertical direction, while forgetting that we’ve done all this before.

Hopefully the creator of (at one point) the world’s most popular game can go on to prove he has more than just a one-button mechanic up his sleeve.

Swing Copters is available on Android and iOS.

UPDATE 21-08-2014: There was a factual slip-up in a sentence about the game’s mechanics. We have corrected it!