It’s getting close to the middle of 2015, and it’s safe to say Flappy mania has almost entirely subsided, but that doesn’t stop iOS developers from continually releasing Flappy-likes on a daily basis. Almost all of them are terrible, highly derivative, and entirely non-noteworthy. If you think that sounds mean, I challenge you to wrap your lips around the App Store fire hose and see how much you can drink… It won’t take you long to see exactly what I mean. It’s not all bad though, as sometimes games pop up on our radar that might be highly derivative clones, but are at least interesting or amusing enough to be noteworthy, which is definitely the case with The Legend of Zeldo: Lonk’s Awakening DX (Free)
So, at first glance you’d look at this and think, “Oh, great, another Flappy game." You’d be right, but, this one is at least worth 30 seconds of your time… Even tapping past the hilariously dodgy prompt at the start asking you if it’s OK if Lonk’s Awakening uses location data (no doubt as part of some ad network SDK the game has included). Having played a Flappy game, you know everything you need to know going into it- You play as a character (in this case, “Lonk"), and try to fly (or jump) through gates of some kind (weird Zelda-like brick walls here).
What makes Lonk’s Awakening interesting, aside from how amusingly self-aware the game is that it’s totally riffing on Zelda, is that the developer has introduced an item system into a Flappy-like. Every few gates, you get a choice of items to get which kind of feels like how the upgrade system in Wayward Souls ($7.99) works. These items are all named something very Zelda-y, and the fun comes from figuring out what they do.
The fairy in a bottle allows you to survive hitting one gate, the Windwaker wand flips gravity, and the Ocarina gives you a button on the side of the screen you can hit to play it. There’s a bunch of other items, and I’m at a loss as to what most of them even do.
If you’ve got room in your heart for another Flappy game, this one is totally worth a look. Also, before getting all wound up about the developer “stealing" anything from Nintendo, it’s pretty clear he didn’t. It’s even mentioned in the iTunes description that all the sprites and everything else are original. Anyway, the item system is pretty neat, which makes me wonder… Is this kind of thing potentially paving the way for a full blown Flappy-like RPG? That might be… Oddly cool.
