PenguFlip in Review – Oodles of Cuteness, but…

Penguins seem to be a real hot property in the App Store – there are lots of games featuring those cute critters. The game in question here is called PenguFlip. The aim of the game is to get your penguin to fly as high as possible before crash-landing to earth. There, sadly, your penguin friend smashes through ice and makes a reappearance as a ghost. Unfortunate, but true.

There are two game modes in PenguFlip: Single Jump and Triple Jump. However, they’re not different modes as the game-play is identical. It’s just that in Single Jump you have only one penguin, and as you may have guessed, there are three in play during the Triple Jump. In the latter, they don’t even jump at the same time, so there’s really no difference at all.

Whichever mode you choose, you begin with your cutesy penguin standing on the ice, waiting for your prompting tap. It will then launch into the air, and you must keep tapping underneath the little mite in order to propel him higher. It’s fairly easy to begin with as even if you tap slightly to one side and send your friend off at an angle, there’s a wall there for him to bounce off. Once you get to stratospheric heights, however, the wall disappears, making the game much more difficult. You must resort to gentle taps which propel the creature straight up rather than at an angle; because if the penguin goes off the side of the screen, it’s Game Over.

On your anti-gravity journey, you’ll see various Bonuses to collect. You can either do this by propelling the penguin into them, or tap them. Either way, they’ll be stored at the bottom of your screen to be used whenever you like. They’re activated by tapping on them. Once you get used to the gameplay, you’ll know how best to utilise these.

When you’ve completed the rise (and inevitable fall of your penguin), you’ll be presented with a summary screen, which tells you your score and gives you the option to submit it to Facebook. This is great, but you’re only posting your scores out – there’s no option to connect with your friends and have their scores show within the App. So when you head to the High Score board, it’ll just be your scores within the Single and Triple Jump categories – which kind of makes the whole scoring thing redundant. If you’re only trying to beat your own score there’s very little urgency or competition, which diminishes the replay value considerably.

There is also a Statistics screen available which gives you information such as; your total play time, how many sessions of each mode you’ve played, how many penguins you’ve launched, and so on. It’s not really all that interesting and doesn’t add anything to the game. Though you may find it interesting if you’re a statistics kind of a person.

Overall, PenguFlip isn’t a bad game, but it could have been so much more. It’s cute and simple, but once you’ve played it a few times, there’s no real need to play it again. Perhaps if it had OpenFeint compatibility, or imported your friends from Facebook and/or Twitter in order to directly compare scores, it’d be more fun. That way, competition is encouraged and people will play repeatedly to beat their friends. Sadly, PenguFlip has none of this, and as such is a cute little game that will probably be entertaining for kids, but adults will end up playing it a few times then forgetting all about it – a shame really.


iTunes: PenguFlip