Frothy Bird is a free-to-play iOS game (reviewed on iPad here), where you play as a hungry bird (not sure why he’s called ‘frothy’). You don’t control the bird’s movement, but you can change his color from black to white and back by tapping on the screen.  Little black and white pellets will fly toward your bird for it to eat, but he can only munch the same colored pellet as he is.  So you must tap to switch to the correct color.  Eating the correct pellet will increase your score, but if you eat the wrong one, it’s Game Over.  So it’s like a cross between Flappy Bird and Ikaruga (that was a shooter where you could change color to absorb black and white bullets).

The neat thing about this game is the variety of ways the pellets can come at you. They can come at a straight line, wave or zig zag, or even swing from behind you.  The bird may even fly to a different position on the screen.  Sometimes the pills (seeds, what are they?) can even change color in mid-flight.  Sometimes your view is hindered by things, like a dark sky that hides the pellets and you only get to see them for a brief bit through the moonlight.  Other times, tanks or planes shoot the pellets at you, and you must remember the color of the vehicle that shoots them.  There’s probably a lot more ways the vittles come flying at you, but I’m not too terribly good at this game so I don’t remember much else.  The patterns change after every ten morsels eaten or so, but in some rounds they can mix things up as well.

When you lose, you can choose to retry at the beginning of the last round you lost on, or you can restart from the beginning. The game will save your highest score either way.  It’s hard to complain about a free game, but I guess it could’ve used some catchy chiptune music while you play, or maybe variations on graphics like an Atari 2600 mode or a 16-bit mode.  But for what it is, it’s still a fun little free time waster and ended up being better than what I thought it would be.

Kid Factor:

Nothing objectionable or violent that I could find. If you lose, the bird just makes a muffled grunt noise and that’s it.  Reading skill is helpful for the instructions, but the game is pretty easy to figure out with very little help.  If you retry a certain number of times, you’ll have to view an advertisement, so some slight parental supervision may be recommended, but there wasn’t any in-game purchases that I could see.

Tags: Game Reviews