Swing Copters Review (iOS)

Are you tired of all the care that goes into most video games to ensure you have a satisfying experience? Do you like games that are only challenging because of how mind-numbingly broken they are? Are you sick of having fun? Well then, you're sure to not have fun playing Swing Copters, the new game from the creator of Flappy Bird, as it's the same painfully frustrating experience as its predecessor in almost every way.

There is no story to be found in Swing Copters, no sense of setting or character. You play as an unnamed, nondescript thing with a helicopter hat. This hat-wearing blob must travel upwards through an endless series of platforms with hammers swinging from them. Every set you navigate it through nets you a point; the more points you have, the more the game has eaten away at your soul.

Swing Copters, like Flappy Bird, is gaming masochism at its most blatant. This is not a game that wants you to have fun, or presents a challenge with any semblance of meaning or logic to it. No, from the first second the game starts it's clear just how much Swing Copters wants to hurt you. Your character moves as if possessed by a Charles Bronson-esque death wish, zooming around and homing in on fatal objects with nigh-unerring accuracy. The massive, often invisible, hitboxes on everything to ensure you see a frequent and unfair demise. The hammers kill you, the platforms kill you, even the edges of the screen kill you; there are times you'll die while swearing you were nowhere near anything that should cause death, but your character moves so spastically fast it's hard to tell exactly where you are. Successfully navigating more than a few obstacles is possible, in theory, but at what cost to your sanity? Swing Copters' official app description claims there are other characters to unlock, but they're gated so far behind the so-difficult-it's-busted content you're unlikely to ever, ever see them. Hell, they may not even exist. If you play Swing Copters for too long, you may begin to wonder whether you exist, either.

Just like Flappy Bird, Swing Copters' backgrounds are bland, Super Mario World knock-offs. The three or four sound effects in the game are even blander. The music? Well, there is no music. The controls are abysmal; among the worst you'll ever find in gaming.

Flappy Bird managed to achieve some strange level of cultural relevancy due to a combination of its low quality, teeth-grinding difficulty, and gamer irony, and Swing Copters may very well rise to success for these very same reasons. Don't let this happen, people. There are literally millions of other games far more deserving of your time and energy than this one. Games are meant to be fun, and those who make them should have some level of enthusiasm for what they're doing. Swing Copters, however, is a thing of hate, and its only goal is to sink its fangs into you and fill you with its venom.

This review was based on a download of Swing Copters for iOS.

App Store Link: Swing Copters for iPhone and iPad | By Dong Nguyen I Price: Free | Version: 1.0.0 | 7.9MB| Rating 4+