Flappy Royale is the inevitable Flappy Bird battle royale, playable in your browser
Proceed with caution.
Flappy Bird, the game about guiding a bird, via flapping its wings, through a series of narrow passages between pipes, now has a battle royale equivalent. It's called Flappy Royale, and while it's obviously a phone game, it can be played in your web browser over here. And I suggest you do, because that's what I'm doing, and I'd like for my misery to be shared by others.
The formula is familiar: there are 99 players, and your 98 competitors are ghosts (in much the same way as they were in Mario Royale). Given the infuriating difficulty of Flappy Bird, matches tend to last around five seconds at most, making it fiendishly addictive.
There are some amusing touches, such as the bus that drops all the flapping birds into the arena before promptly crashing to the ground. And you can customise your bird as well – instead of being a bird, you can be a banana. There is also a Daily Trial mode, but it's not working for me for some reason.
The game is a collaboration between Orta Therox and Em Lazer-Walker. The original creator of Flappy Bird, Dong Nguyen, removed his game from the App Store and Google Play in 2014 because, according to him, it was too addictive. And I'm inclined to agree with him.
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Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.