Penguins can fly!
Developer: Light Bringer
The beauty of flash games is that they can be about absolutely anything. We love good games and we love silly games. Learn to Fly, a game by Light Bringer about a frustrated penguin that learns to fly with a 4 star rating on Kongregate sounded perfect.
Taking off
At the beginning there is not much to it. Bouncing in the water is the only thing your penguin can do.
After a cute and quite funny intro, the game starts. The intrepid penguin propels itself from a ramp and you have to help it last as long as possible in the air. The problem is that it’s a penguin. And penguins, in case you didn’t know, don’t fly. The best you can do is adjust the angle of the penguin to make it bounce in the water and make it glide a few seconds longer. Not the most thrilling gaming experience.
After every jump, you get money to buy upgrades to your game: ramp height, acceleration and air resistance. Still, the effects of the upgrades are not very clear in the gameplay. The game is pretty much the same: controlling a penguin for a couple of seconds between flash animations. At this point (maybe 5 or 10 minutes into the game), you might feel bored, give up, and go for a beer. I wouldn’t blame you. After all we all know penguins can’t fly.
If you are a bit patient, however, you can get a glider for your penguin and start flying.
Flying
With a glider and rockets, now your penguin stands a chance. The game is still silly but becomes fun.
Things become interesting from this point and you can understand why other people liked the game. Each flight now lasts several seconds and you can interact more with the game. Pretty soon you will get the rockets and at this point you will probably want to finish the game.
Each stage is the same but the different achievements keep it interesting. The grading of the achievements is at a well balanced point where they are meaningful but still quite easy to get. For each stage you have an achievement based on distance, another one on height, another one on speed and another one on flight duration. The last stage has a final achievement, flying for 6,000 feet, after which you essentially finish the game and see a cute flash outro.
Conclusion
If you had asked me to rate this game a couple of minutes into it you would not have gotten a good review. That might be the problem of the game. The start is slow and that tends to be critical for casual games. Most good casual games are tailored to give you instant satisfaction, but not Learn To Fly. Perhaps this could be solved by letting us interact more and giving us more control other than just adjusting the angle. Once we get a glider the rest of the game is good. Even the music loop is quite pleasing.
The game does not have much replay value. Once you reach your final achievement, the only incentive you have to play again is finishing the game in a shorter period of time. The game does give you some minutes of stupid fun, which is all that casual gaming is about. Definitely a great achievement if this is Light Bringer’s first game.
CGI Rating:
I got all achievements (except the hard one) and the card in one sitting. For such a simple and over done game concept, I found this to be surprisingly entertaining.
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