Reviews

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

This is a sort-of multilingual Flappy Bird with cats and charts. And tortoises, because every fable needs a tortoise, of course. Wacky hijinx ensue.

The original Flappy Bird is ridiculous, of course, and this parody version is even more so. Full of gags, screams and other slapstick sound effects.

Animals say nonsensical things to you through speech balloons in one of six random languages. There is even a multilingual voice-over, this is a nice touch. I wonder where you got recordings in different languages. Are they from a voice generation service?

There are bar charts for things like "Vulpix vs Charmander fire hazard" or "Pikachu's voltage" (also translated in various languages). They form an obstacle just as well, and a perch for cats and tortoises, so they are an integral part of the game. The cats jump at you at an unpredictable arc. Iridescence comes back in two ways: through the background sound track, and the dying animation, but it's a little bit less strongly integrated into the game.

This game doesn't take itself too seriously. The random jumps of the cats should be frustrating, but they aren't because this game isn't about reaching some goal, it's a parody experience.

I think the multiplayer mode is genius. It's actually feasible to play with 6 people at the same time, each reaching out to press a single key on the same keyboard. We managed to play together with 5 people in the office, and it was great chaotic fun.

Playable and funny, especially if you can round up 5 friends to play on a single keyboard.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by KillerWasp all reviews by KillerWasp

Completely broken. I can not play. Assuming you used JS for portability but it all went down the drain and don't work in my browser.

Result of gameplay:
https://vimeo.com/834277106

You also showed a lack of interest or creativity in trying to copy in such a boring game whose popularity was forced by google advertising. I expected something more creative or more interesting.

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None

Review by SiegeLord all reviews by SiegeLord

Flappy Bird Racing is a janky multiplayer flappy bird clone with a surreal atmosphere. There are multiple levels of increasing difficulty, both coming from the flappy bird mechanics but also assorted animals, especially cats, that seek out to kill you. The game is actually rather difficult even to start, since the randomly placed cats seem to make some levels unbeatable without restarting and regenerating the level. The shortcomings of the gameplay I think are mitigated by a pretty good split-screen multiplayer support. I tested it by myself, and I can see that it can be very fun (although performance kind of tanked...).

A highlight of the game are the graphics and sounds. The graphics are a mix of stock art and animals composed of simple geometric shapes. The music is midi covers of popular songs having to do with flight, and the sounds are... well, I liked the screams your bird makes when it dies. Honestly, I liked the janky feel this gave the game. An interesting innovation to the game was how it was multi-lingual, and the language was chosen randomly. That was very clever and innovative.

For the rules, the genre was fulfilled fine: there were 3 types of animals. The iridiscence wasn't super prevalent, mostly some rainbow effects here and there. Rainbow colors are not iridiscence. The dialog, as it were, was implemented okay with speech bubbles for the animals. The charts were occasionally a part of the gameplay arena, but they seemed tacked on and didn't obviously display anything specific to the game or really affected the gameplay by their presence. The bonus rule was implemented very well, with great multiplayer support.

Overall, I got a bit of enjoyment out of this one. I liked it.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by underthesink all reviews by underthesink

The screams are not appreciated

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 2 Genre 4

Review by Yubi all reviews by Yubi

The cats! The murderous cats perched on bar graphs! I see their expressionless faces in my nightmares.

I can't help but compare Flappy Bird Racing to the original Flappy Bird. They're both difficult games, but Racing is more forgiving with its checkpoints, more spontaneous in its randomness, and an overall satisfying game to play. FBR combines many unexpected elements to create something new and delightful, making the original seem rather dull and repetitive by comparison.

The one thing that the original does better however, is movement: its purposefully clumsy hops and skips nonetheless feel crisp and engaging over time. FBR's movement feels a bit floaty - which is to say I don't feel an intuitive sense of upward momentum or gravity when the bird rises or falls. Victorwss was kind enough to inform me that gravity acting on the bird scales with the current level, but I still prefer the original's ungraceful, but consistent motions.

With those comparisons out of the way, I will try to review my favourite features of FBR on their own merits from here on.

Genre (animals):
I love the various screams the birds emit when they crash. They remain somewhat startling to me even though I have heard them hundreds of times, and I've nearly started to think of them as a consolation prize for dying.

I'm not sure what the tortoises represent, but tortoises are always welcome.

Then there are, of course, the cats, which make an already challenging game even more so. I found that they were more fun in the game's intended multiplayer mode where having to deal with them seemed to even out the playing field through as much luck as skill, than in single-player where I could only blame myself or blame the game. My only real complaint about the cats is that they sometimes appear to attack you from behind when the left edge of the screen is about to scroll past them, making their angle of approach unpredictable.

Artistic (comic bubble dialogue):
The multilingual birds were a great touch, and I was overjoyed to be given a Canadian bird on the first playthrough. I thought for a moment that the game had some location-tracking feature. It is strange that I feel compelled to play better simply because the bird is from my country, but it works and I must give you a thumbs up for this.

I feel like I see the same dialogues quite often though, and it would have been a treat to see more variety here even if just as additional variations on "I'm back!"

Artistic (iridescence):
Linkin Park's Iridescence? Sure, why not. Nice thinking outside the box here; if I were the rules-judge I'd give this a pass. The music playback was a little fuzzy though.

Technical (graph):
Bar graphs as deadly obstacles and perches for cats was this game's crowning idea. Well done.

Co-op:
I only had one other person to play with, but I enjoy the flying over the cross-eyed corpses of my rivals. I wish there were bird-themed ways to interact with them, but what you've presented already feels sufficient.

On single player mode however, it would have been nice for the respawn timer to be reduced from ten seconds. It feels like a long wait that excerabates some of the game's "unfair" or unlucky moments.

Parting thoughts:
I admit that I ended up enjoying Flappy Bird Racing only after playing for some time. I held some bias against the original FB that did translate to my first impression of your game, but soon conceded that what you've added new ideas to create something incomparably engaging.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical None Technical None Genre None