The incredibly addictive Flappy Bird captivated mobile gamers with its cruel challenge and simple single tap controls. Rovio’s Retry, now being tested in select markets, takes that same punishing hook to the next level.
The basic idea is simple. The player must fly their plane from one end of a level to the next. The challenge stems from the way that plane controls. Holding a finger against the screen causes the plane to loop in a circle. In order to move forward, rhythmic tapping is required. If players were just flying through a series of pipes, that would be fine, but the levels in Retry are meandering affairs, littered with vertical rises and drops.
Mix in directional winds, and you’ve got videos like the one above, in which I throw myself against a wall over and over and over again. If it weren’t for the game’s level structure (not endless, like Flappy Bird) and the ability to collect coins on each level to unlock new respawn points, I’d have probably broken my iPhone by now. Instead, this article is late because I couldn’t put the damn thing down.
Retry, the first game to be released under Rovio’s experimental LVL11 label, is currently available for free in select regional iTunes stores, with a worldwide release coming soon.
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