Warning: one does not simply play one game of Flappy Bird. 

.Gears Studio’s Flappy Bird is nothing short of what Angry Birds and Robot Unicorn proved before it. Simple is addicting, and this game is addicting and free.

I first heard of this game through word of mouth before realizing this game has a player count of more than 16 million according to iPhone leader boards. After I decided to download it, I realized I made a big mistake as to how many hours I have spent playing.

The idea of the game is simple: You are a bird that automatically flies horizontally and you tap your touch screen on your iPhone or Android device to flap the birds wings to keep it in the air. You then try to fly through the virtually endless line of vertically placed Super Mario look alike tubes with gaps in the middle to get a point. Sound easy? It is not.

This game is hard, very hard. And this game is unforgiving, very unforgiving. You will fail time and time again.

For a game that is very simple in design, my high score (currently) is 13. That took me days to get, and that is the best part of this game. 

When you achieve you feel good. Getting through the first set of tubes may take a few games, but when you get through one it feels like a grand achievement. Until you realize you have an endless amount of tubes left to fly through.

You will play game after game just to get that high score that feels like it never has an end. 

There is not much more to Flappy Bird. There’s no story, no overall goal besides getting a better high score and yet that is a good addition to this game. 

In a video game industry riddled with triple A games that are trying to be more like summer block buster movies than simple video games, Flappy Bird is a nice nod to the pointless, impossible and simplicity of classic games like Super Mario and Pac-man. 

There is a difference between the versions of the game on the iPhone and the Android versions. The Android version seems to run flawlessly as well as features color and setting elements changing from time to time. The iPhone version of the game is the complete opposite. There is severe lag within the game and no change in color as well as being full of advertisements whereas the Android version is advertisement free. 

If you get addicted to things easy or find yourself easily frustrated, I hope you have a good phone contract because this game might make you put your own phone in a blender. It is hard not to recommend Flappy Bird for it is a love/hate game. You will obsess and hate it at the same time. 

I hope to see a sequel/update for this game to fix the strong difference within the iPhone version. But if Flappy Bird continues to boast its 16 million plus players, there will be many more Flappy Birds to play with. 

3.5/5