A one-eyed pixelated yellow bird with big red lips flapping through Super Mario pipes captivated the world 9 years ago. The game Flappy Bird flapped its way to the top, being the biggest game on the App Store before. Now, Fancy Games Studios’ play-to-earn “Fancy Birds” is also flying up in the Polygon Network gaming charts.

The idea of Fancy Birds came to Mr. Fancy after Kieran Warwick, co-founder of Illuvium, tweeted about the idea of a P2E version of Flappy Bird. Kieran Warwick later on became one of the project’s strategic advisors after Mr. Fancy, as he is known in Discord and the whitepaper, showed the working demo of Fancy Birds. This project claims that their team is built by experienced people in the field of GameFi. However, I was a bit skeptical after finding out that most of the members of the Fancy Birds team do not have any extensive identifying information published nor their personal image publicized. Instead, the team used the NFT of their project as their display picture. Despite this, the project managed to onboard large partners like PathDAO, Merit Circle and Yield Guild Games (YGG).

Fancy Birds, which launched last February 2022 was inspired from the addictive gameplay of the hit 2013 casual arcade game, Flappy Bird. Only this time, there is an earning element and NFT integration. Fancy Birds has this hypnotic side-scrolling gameplay where players tap their screen or spacebar to flap their bird’s wings to keep it in air and fly through the virtually endless lines of vertically placed tree trunks with gaps in the middle. Every successful pass in the tree trunk obstacle, gets a “ding” and a point. Sounds easy, right? But no, Fancy Birds’ gameplay can also be challenging since it can only take a second to get your first infuriating taste of defeat. The distance between the obstacles are narrow and the control over the bird is imprecise. Players have to start over if their bird nose-dives to the ground or plow beak-first to the obstacle.

Meanwhile, the Fancy Birds NFT are randomly generated to have one-of-a-kind appearances from combinations of unique traits. These funky little avians have their own unique combination of accessory, beak, body, eye, head, and wings. Also coming in different rarities where you can earn more with rarer birds. Although the NFT birds are needed to unlock the play-to-earn component of the game, free-to-play gamers can enjoy options to rent a bird. Earning is available through in-game reward mechanics such as doing the daily and weekly challenges. Afterwards, these tokens can be exchanged for cash, staked, or be used in breeding more birds.

Passing through the first set of the tree trunk obstacle took me a few games to get a feel for it but when I go past one it feels like an achievement. Not until realization hits that there is an endless sea of tree trunks left to fly through and it’s only a relentlessly repetitious game. While this game may be addictive to some, I believe that a certain addictive or compulsive quality alone isn’t sufficient to make a genuinely good game. I think Fancy Birds is the same way that popping bubble wrap is, satisfying to waste your time with but not worth obsessing over.

Currently, there is not much more to Fancy Birds than just relentless tapping. In my opinion, it’s not giving that much experience outside of mechanical mastery of tapping. There’s no story, no variation and the gameplay currently doesn’t evolve in interesting ways. The number on the screen is the only indicator of progress. Nevertheless, I would love to see Fancy Birds prove my points wrong and add more fun features around Fancy Birds Metaverse.

Overall, Fancy Birds isn’t entirely unlikable, it can be surprisingly addictive and be a fun short-term distraction for the score-obsessed individuals. It’s just that in this world of the game industry being riddled by triple A games, there are legions of truly worthwhile P2E games in existence out there other than this project. But simple games like Fancy Birds is a nice nod if you’re into the simplicity of classic games that resonate to players of all ages.