Flappy Bird is a free game by independent game designer Dong Nguyen that is currently topping the charts. Although several months old, Flappy Bird has suddenly shot to fame after a wave of social media exposure. But is Flappy Bird any good? Our Flappy Bird review checks under its feathers.

The gameplay premise of Flappy Bird is simple. You have a bird on the screen and tapping it makes the aforesaid Flappy Bird flap its wings and arc up and down. The background is a constant scroll and you have to flap the Flappy Bird through gaps made by large green pipes. If the Flappy Bird touches a pipe, or the ground, your game is over. You score a single point for each gap you pass through.

Flappy Bird is nothing if not frustrating. You’ll start by hitting the first pipe. After several Flappy Bird games you might be up to three or four points. Give it a few hours and you might top 20. You start to wonder if there really is method to the madness: “maybe I need to tap more regularly by counting”, “perhaps I should aim for the bottom of the first pipe”, “what if try double tapping?” This is the route to madness. There is no method here. It’s mostly luck and how good your reaction timing is.

The distance between pipes is narrow, and your control over the Flappy Bird is clumsy and imprecise. Our Flappy Bird record stands at 19 pipes; we imagine many people give up after hitting the first few pipes. On the other hand Game Centre is packed full of people with 9,999 pipes, which we assume is the limit of the game’s counter. Either that or they have a hack. Maybe they’ve found a hack for life that enables them to dodge gainful employment but become a 10th Dan Ninja Flappy Bird game player. Maybe it’s a zen thing. There are unanswered questions.