How hard can being a bird be?

Flappy Bird is an infuriatingly difficult casual game in which you need to steer a hapless pixelated bird through tubes.

Flap through the gap

The principle of Flappy Bird is very simple – to fly through as many gaps as you can without hitting a pipe. It’s a similar gaming mechanic to the popular tap-to-hover helicopter genre of games like iCopter TNG. It’s fun – but insanely frustrating!

Tap to flap

The controls in Flappy Bird are simple – you just tap to flap – but the game is so hard that you can spend an hour practicing and you’ll still only have made it through five or six gaps. Sometimes you’ll think that you’ve made it through a gap only to clip the edge of the pipe on your way back and then it’s back to the beginning for you.

A 90s throwback

Graphically, Flappy Bird is very basic and looks like its come straight out of an 8-bit console. The bird himself is cute and his little pixelated face makes you feel all the sorrier when you smack him into a pipe for the 500th time. 

The background in Flappy Bird is unimaginative and looks like it’s been lifted from any of the countless cutesy platformers of the early 1990s. Don’t expect any lavish animation either, Flappy Bird is pretty jerky.

Crazy fun

Flappy Bird can be so annoying that you’ll want to throw your phone out of the window, and at the same time it hooks you into coming back as you think “surely I’ll get the hang of it now”. Once you’ve installed Flappy Bird you’ll wish you hadn’t!

Please note that Flappy Bird is no longer available to download from the App Store. Take a look at the best alternatives to Flappy Bird instead.