Fly the Bird

Genre: Arcade / On-Rails Flight Sim

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Pix Arts

.

Review:

Fly the Bird, released as an asset on the Unity Asset Store in 2019 as Sky Flight, and brought to the Nintendo Switch as a low-effort asset flip in 2021, is an Arcade-style On-Rails Flight Sim where players guide a polygonal bird over a polygonal landscape, trying to pass through rings as they appear.

This game features fairly simple 3D visuals that get the job done, but don’t do much more than that. Despite the visual simplicity, there’s even some pop-in here, but it doesn’t exactly make the game look especially worse, since it already has a sorta’ artificial retro look to it. This retro-style look is enhanced by the game’s soundtrack, which has a sorta’ hypnotic retro quality to it, and in another game, I could see this being the sort of thing you could continue playing for a few minutes or a few hours to relax.

Unfortunately, this isn’t another game. Instead, what you have here is a simple game that has you directing your bird to rings as they appear, and the game raises the challenge not by making the landscape more difficult and elaborate, but by making the bird continue to fly faster. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, except within a minute of playing the game, the bird will already be traveling at speeds so fast that it will be unable to turn to make it to rings in time, with players quickly losing the three chances they’re given, failing, and being forced to restart.

That’s it, that’s the entire game, that’s all Fly the Bird has to offer players – a brief moment of pleasant enjoyment at its simple presentation, less than a minute of gameplay before things become unplayable, and then frustration as it sets in that the game forces you to lose and start again so quickly. I could see this game offering players something enjoyable if it did something else with the core gameplay here, but what’s here is an absolute waste of time and money. Do not be fooled into buying it.

tl;dr – Fly the Bird is an Arcade-style On-Rails Flight Sim that has you flying a bird through rings. The presentation is decent, and there was some potential here for a nice, trance-like experience. Unfortunately, that is absolutely ruined by the game ramping up its speed so quickly that it becomes virtually unplayable within a minute of firing it up. Don’t waste your time with this one.

Grade: F

.

This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2021 Game Awards:

Winner:

Worst Asset Flip – While there were a lot of terrible asset flips on Nintendo Switch in 2021 (and there shouldn’t be any!), the worst one had to be Fly the Bird. While I strongly considered granting this award to Retro Fighter, a game that you can play by holding down a button and turning away from your TV screen, I ultimately had to admit that Fly the Bird was worse, as this game becomes literally unplayable after just a few seconds of play.

Worst Game – I do not automatically think that just because a game is an asset flip that it is bad. A few asset flips have been genuinely decent… or at least playable. But Fly the Bird is neither decent nor playable – your entire gameplay experience with this game will be starting the game, maneuvering through rings, and then a few seconds later dying because the game’s speed became so fast so quickly that it was no longer humanly possible to maneuver. Take that few seconds and repeat it for however many times it takes you to get so sick of this game you delete it off of your Nintendo Switch. Do yourself a favor and simply do not buy it in the first place.

.

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Lee, Andy Miller, Stov, u/wonderponder, Johannes, Ilya Zverev, Eli Goodman, and KC. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}