Posted by Ryan Johnson on 09 22, 2010

Flight Doodle

Categories: Games, | 0 comments | |

Cut the ropes, soar into the sky, and begin your endless ascent into the realm of global leaderboard dominance in the very addictive, well put together, Flight Doodle! No springs, no bouncing, no aliens, no platforms, in this game you hop on board your flying apparatus and charge upward in skies filled with crash inducing diddies. Tacks, winds, airplanes, and more threaten your advance. Mastery of tilt and speed are required for dominance.

Created by Eyedip LLC, the makers of the popular Pocket Devil game, Flight Doodle is just another addition to the immensely crowded assortment of doodle themed games available in the iTunes App Store. The object of the game is to fly your balloon (or whatever else you’re flying) further than anybody else. As you’d expect there are a variety of things to prevent you from doing so, namely storm clouds, prevailing winds, falling tacks, airplanes, and floating chunks of land. Avoiding these is a full-time job. Thankfully there are several bonusses you can earn and collect along the way. If you see stars make sure to grab them because they give you a nice skip ahead. In addition you can earn the ability to shrink yourself so it’s easier to avoid stuff, turn on a shield so nothing can hurt you, and can fire bullets to free up some space. Bullets are kind of a double edged sword though because if you miss your target not only do you have to avoid hitting your target but the bullet loses momentum and starts falling back toward you.

There’s a nice selection flying apparatuses to choose from in the game. There’s multiple balloons, light bulbs, snow globes, and more. Each of which you can further customize by adding your own color and designs, which is a nice added touch. To navigate your balloon (or whatever you’ve chosen) you simply tilt your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad from side-to-side. There are a handful of speed related controls at your disposal to help you advance faster and avoid obstacles more efficiently. There are buttons for speeding up and slowing down at will, and a button that abruptly boosts you up to the top of the screen. I found the speed up button to be pretty handy, and if you time it just right the boost button may be able to get you out of a jam. The boost button shoots you straight to the top of the screen, so if you find yourself in a situation where you need to get out of dodge quick you should probably press it.

Overall I was impressed with the quality of the game. I felt like pretty much every aspect of it was extremely well done. The imagery, menus, game-play, and replayability are all excellent for a doodle themed game. The most critical part of the game to master is the tilt controls. Finding the sensitivity setting that bets suits you is key. It can be tricky at times because objects come at you pretty quickly and leave minimal room for error, but because you’re flying there’s a little of over-steer with every movement. The best way I found to combat the over-steer is to keep the pedal to the medal by holding down the Speed Up button. There’s pluses and minuses to doing this, but for me it seems to work well. Typically Flight Doodle is $0.99 which is definitely a decent price for what you get. I have to mention though that the app is currently free, which was originally supposed to just be a one day promotion, but it appears to have stuck around for a few days so if you don’t already have it I recommend snagging it while it’s on the house!

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