Of the countless Flappy Bird clone developers in the mobile world who've tried to capitalize on the game's success and fill the void left by the app's removal, yet one more studio has stepped into the ring, and it's a name you might recognize.
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Epic Games, the studio behind the Gears of War and Unreal Tournament series, and the upcoming Fortnite, is inexplicably the latest (emphasis on late) studio to climb aboard the Flappy Bird bandwagon. Tappy Chicken is the game in question, made using Unreal Engine 4, which is akin to using NASA hardware to run MS Paint.
The only question is, why?
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Going by the studio's offiicial description of the game from its iOS and Google Play pages, it's because, "Tappy Chicken is the perfect showcase for the ease of use and flexibility of Unreal Engine 4. While it may not flex the full graphical muscle of the engine, it shows how almost anyone can make a fun and pretty game fit for mobile devices and web browsers."
Quite true, as according to the description,Tappy Chicken was created by an Epic employee with no coding experience, hinting at the engine's ease of use, and is in no way related to engine being available currently for $19 a month, a mere drop in the hat if it can rake in the $50,000 a day Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen was rumored to be getting.
As you'd expect, there's nothing vastly different from Flappy Bird and Tappy Chicken, or the hundreds, if not thousands of other clones out there. Once Nguyen removed the app from the marketplace under the guise of being too addictive, Pocket Gamer estimated that a clone of the original hit the iOS App Store at the absurd rate of one every 24 minutes.
The bird and background are different, and the pipes are replaced by hacked up tree trunks that abide by the same physics as Minecraft's gravity defying flora. But the gameplay remains exactly the same, and features the same unforgiving hit detection. A humorous egg-pooping death animation is about the only difference, good enough for a chuckle once or twice, but beyond that, the game is little more than a veiled advertisement aimed at those with lofty aspirations of catching lightning in a bottle just like Mr. Nguyen did months ago.
Still, it's a free grab on iOS or Google Play for whoever wants to try it. A version is also coming to browsers this afternoon, at which point the team will discuss the game and development of making a 2D game in a livestream.
