Frenchy Bird review

They should have named it Crappy Bird

Review written by
Matt Clewley

April 5th, 2015

As I discovered the world of video gaming at a young age, I play all these wonderful new games and always notice where their influences come from. You have games like Call of Duty overtaking Doom in the FPS world thanks to online play, you have Shovel Knight surpassing old games like Super Mario Bros with its recent awards and mouth-watering gameplay. The influences are obvious ones, and being influential on newcomers is impossible to avoid. The older you get, the more you realise, not even a Wikipedia search about games having an impact on each other will fully educate you unless you actually play these games yourself. However, some games do take the piss when it comes this subject. With Frenchy Bird, you don't need any background information on what it's going to be, you know from the title.

Frenchy Bird is a game where you play a Parisian pigeon flying through the streets of France avoiding lamp posts. It's endless, so you have to keep flying until you smash your face into the ridged corner near the light. The more you keep this up of course, the higher your score will be. So, what similarities to other games have you come up with? Still struggling to find out? Well, let me go through this with you and maybe you can comprehend where I am coming from.

It's Flappy Bird, but it's not. The gameplay is identical to Flappy Bird, the level structure is as well, but the only difference is that the camera is on a different angle compared to the 2D view of Flappy Bird. You press A continuously like you would tap on a touch screen to go in between two lampposts. One of the lampposts is on the ground, whilst the other one defies gravity. It's difficult to say the gameplay is good because the game is a blatant rip off, but at least it works. There are a couple of frustrating moments when you smack into a lamppost and it seems like you didn't touch it. The only thing about this game I enjoy is the leaderboard. It's a clever way of bringing in players to this game to compete with each other, there's nothing more fun than being cocky over a simple game just to one-up someone on a leaderboard that barely anyone cares about.

Even if the leaderboard is a nice addition, it's the only nice addition. Graphics aren't everything in a game, but Frenchy Bird looks horrendous. The background looks like a JPEG of a badly taken picture on a drunken honeymoon. The lampposts look like hairclips you would buy from your local supermarket for 50 English pence pieces. The bird itself flies like it has been shot in the back with several rounds from a pellet gun. The game could only just pass to be an N64 game on a good day.

Not even Hans Zimmer could save this game from its atrocious soundtrack and audio. We get the whole French theme to it, however when it's the same crappy song that's playing throughout it just makes the game even more unbearable. The fast strumming on a guitar near the start of the game feels like someone is wiping the sweat from your forehead with a cheese grater. I have to admit, I do like the menu music, at least it gives you a cheerful feel before you end up playing a lazy rip off. The audio only comes from when you hit either the floor or a lamppost. It's probably put in on the purpose to feel worse about hitting a lamppost, but it's an ugly noise in this game. It would suit an old cartoon when violence used to be okay in the animated world on daytime TV.

I don't think the £1.79 price of Frenchy Bird even justifies how bad it actually is. Frenchy Bird is just a rip off from a game that has been taken to the vet and put down quite a while ago (Flappy Bird even had its own showcase at the Natural History Museum in London). This game is suitable for a child for a cheap price, but if you love your child then I'd suggest you should buy something like Rayman Legends. Frenchy Bird's leaderboard scores are its key feature, but other than that it's just another game with lazy development and no originality whatsoever that's plaguing not only Nintendo's eShop, but also the gaming market in general. Stay away from this game and buy something like EDGE or RUSH, I promise you a good time with them.