PiyoRide!

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

.

Review:

PiyoRide! is a family-friendly two-button mobile-style Arcade game released on Nintendo Switch in 2026. In this game, players control one of various characters riding atop a floating… cat? Tanuki? Well, in any case, this game is basically a take on Flappy Bird. Is it a good take on Flappy Bird? Wellll…

At the very least, the presentation here is decent, with colorful cartoony 2D visuals and upbeat music that works well for this game’s simple gameplay. The backgrounds can be blurry and low-quality, but overall this game looks and sounds decent enough.

As for the gameplay, while there’s nothing outright terrible here, that’s only because there’s not much here at all. The gameplay is simple and shallow and you will bore of it quickly – hold down the A button to rise, release it to fall, and press L or R to use a dodge move to briefly avoid taking damage. Add to that an energy meter you need to refill with pickups and five hearts that deplete when you get hit, leading to the end of your run when they run out, and that’s… it. I suppose there’s a bit of variety in the obstacles you face, but even that starts to repeat quickly enough.

To its credit, PiyoRide! at least doesn’t control as horribly as Flappy Bird, but that’s not exactly a high bar to cross. And that’s PiyoRide!’s problem – not that anything it does is done poorly, but that it has its sights set so very low. It’s copying a game that’s notorious for being terrible. Is it any great surprise that the result is something shallow, repetitive, and dull?

tl;dr – PiyoRide! is a family-friendly 2-button Arcade-style game where players control a character riding some sort of cat or something. It doesn’t matter, this is a game that’s copying Flappy Bird. And to its credit, it’s not a bad Flappy Bird clone, but the problem is that Flappy Bird was a terrible game, and this game doesn’t add enough to make it much more worthwhile. It’s shallow and repetitive and you’ll lose interest in it soon after playing. Don’t waste time or money on this.

Grade: D+

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

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Johannes, Jaka, Jared Wark, Gabriel Coronad-Medina, Francis Obst, Kristoffer Wulff, Seth Christenfeld, and Vince Verrinoldi. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}