Tiny Wings

Tiny Wings Review

by on April 7, 2011

We know it: we’re suckers for anything that lets us catapult birds about. However, avian protagonists aside, Tiny Wings is nothing like Angry Birds – which isn’t to say it won’t gobble up your free time like ducks with bread.

The story runs thus: you are a little blue bird that has always dreamed of taking to the skies, but have been cruelly held back by your titular tiny wings. That means that the only way you can fly is by propelling yourself skyward using the hills around your nest as vert ramps. The main mechanic of the game is tapping the iPhone screen, which makes your bird tuck its wings in, sending him plumetting toward the ground and, hopefully, onto the downward slope of a hill. This builds up momentum, which translates into a higher jump when you slide up the side of the next hill, and so on and so on into the clouds.

Your bird is pursued on his journey by nightfall, which if it catches up to you will cause your bird to cozy up for the night and go to sleep (Tiny Wings’ equivalent of a game over). However, the hills you’re scooting along are broken up into different coloured islands, and escaping from one to another pushes the night back (a bit like crossing time zones), giving you more time on the next island to collect more points – which you do either by pulling off big jumps or diving down to pick up lines of gold coins.

There’s really not a lot more to Tiny Wings than that. You’ll spend a fair bit of time getting used to the physics of the game at first, and diving at the wrong moment – into the upward slope of a hill, for instance – brings your bird to a grinding halt. But once mastered, flinging the little guy into the stratosphere after a run of successful jumps is awfully moresome. There’s not as much depth to this as our other iPhone favourites (Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies, for instance), but Tiny Wings, with its watercolour graphics and simple, just-one-more-go gameplay, will be taking up our lunch breaks for weeks to come.

Download this app: Tiny Wings for iPhone

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