Following hot on the tiny footsteps of Angry Birds, Tiny Feet and Drop The Chicken, Air Penguin aims to become the next feathery hero of the App Store.
These days a quick look at the top-selling apps in the Apple App Store makes for familiar reading – birds, birds, birds. Whether it’s the Angry Birds that have sold over 100m units, the flightless hill-rolling bird from Tiny Feet or the gravity-confirming Drop The Chicken, every iOS developer wants us to play with their feathery friend.
The latest bird to try his luck is Air Penguin, the star of a self-titled tilting app that is currently the No 1 paid app in the US App store, while sitting pretty in the Irish charts at 19 as of this writing. Not bad for an app in its first week of release.
Air Penguin casts players in the role of a flightless penguin that must use multi-directional tilt control gameplay to navigate 100 Antarctic stages to save his family from melting ice caps, a challenge neatly demonstrated in a short prologue of comic strip-style story sequences.
Developers Gamevil’s blurb for their latest app suggests that ‘All you need to know is how to tilt’ and they’re absolutely right. Try imagine a top-down version of tilt favourite Doodle Jump and you’re halfway there.
Is Air Penguin the bravest bird in all of gaming? He might be
In much the same manner as Doodle Jump’s forever-hopping hero, Air Penguin somersaults forward on a continuous basis, save a couple of brief sliding ice flow interludes. Your objective is to safely navigate through each level by accurately judging the accuracy and power of your tilt to allow our penguin hero to hop along ice islands, while avoiding pitfalls such as collapsing islands and even sharks.
Air Penguin levels are punctuated by a winners flag to land upon, while your eventual score will take into account any bonus points you may have accrued, your time taken and your collectible golden fish haul, five of which can be found in each level.
These fish are essentially the in-game currency, allowing you to purchase extra lives or special items. Quite cynically, the game’s store allows you to purchase more fish with actual money – do you really want to buy 1500 fishes for €7.99? I hope not.
Aside from its excellent Story Mode, Air Penguin also features a Survival mode; a high-score section that is centered upon bouncing impressive distances to share on your Twitter, Facebook or Game Center account for posterity. Best of all, much like this mode’s closest inspiration, Doodle Jump, the Survival mode level is endless and randomly-generated.
Packed with replayability and ingenious moments (unlocking the ‘Like A Bird’ achievement as you first soar high into the sky is exhilarating), Air Penguin feels like the natural progression of titles such as Doodle Jump, offering far more value, smarter design and variety into the bargain.
Extremely difficult to put down (adding by the fact that honestly, the replay screen appears as though your poor penguin is slowly drowning), polished to the nth degree and an absolute steal at just 79c, we can expect Air Penguin to remain top of the App Store pecking order for quite some time.
Air Penguin is available to download from the Apple App Store for €0.79.
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