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At the height of its success, the easy to play but notoriously hard to master mobile app Flappy Bird was raking in around $50,000 a day for its creator Dong Nguyen. Tasking the player with navigating an aerially-challenged bird between pipes of various sizes without dropping to the ground, all that Flappy Bird’s gameplay really involved was several well placed taps on a screen.Even so, it was fun and frustrating and oh so difficult to get the hang of (a sneeze could spell the end of a potentially high-scoring run, or change of song on your phone could destroy your inner rhythm making it that much harder.) Nguyen got plenty of abuse for it too, eventually pulling the game off Google Play and the App Store explaining that the whole ordeal was too stressful for him to maintain.

Promises were made that the game would come back, meaning fans wouldn’t have to settle for the many Flappy Bird clones or the Amazon Fire TV-exclusive Flappy Birds Family - which adds multiplayer and new obstacles. However, for ultimate gaming masochists, Nguyen’s new game Swing Copters could provide even more of a challenge than the bird-based app.

Offering the same pixelated art-style as Flappy Bird, Swing Copters looks like its horizontal sibling. But as the gameplay footage above will tell you, Swing Copters is actually a lot more brutal and infuriating.

Swing Copters

Like Flappy Bird, Swing Copters is an avoid-or-die game. You play as a cutesy character with a ‘copter’ on their head, using a series of taps to ascend and avoid the ‘swing’ of the game’s hammers. Points are picked up for each swing gate passed through. Swing Copters won't make it easy though, as taps are directional.

Unlike Flappy Bird’s ‘controlled descent’ style of play, Swing Copters is all the more difficult as you’ll have to time the swings in order to pass through them safely. Failing to do so will bag you a ‘plunk’ on the head resulting in your rotors breaking, and an end to the round.

On the bright side, returning to the menu screen over and over (and over again) can be made just a little less annoying, as Nguyen is offering Swing Copters players the chance to remove all advertisements. From the in-game menu you get the option to ‘Remove Ads’ for $0.99. Granted, the ads aren’t particularly in your face but as Swing Copters is free and will likely sap even more of our free time than Flappy Bird before it, it might be a worthy way of saying thank you to Nguyen the frustrating genius of his games.

Swing Copters will be released on iOS and Android on August 21st.

Source: Touch Arcade