Swing Copters Is Live, Not to Be Confused with Tube Revenge

Swing Copters, the guy who made Flappy Bird‘s next mobile game, is live now as promised, though you’ll have to search to find it (it wasn’t charting as this post went up), and that means sorting through all the soundalike (and in some cases lookalike) copycat versions.

On the Google Play store, you’ll find a bunch, including one that looks visually and functionally identical to Swing Copters titled “Copters swing.”

At this point, there’s just one turning up in my App Store results, a little tapper called Tube Revenge – Swing Copters. It’s not a last minute clone, either: its version history dates back to March 2014. Weirder still, its designer describes it as inspired by Flappy Bird. For the record, Flappy Bird debuted in May 2013 and went viral in January 2014, Tube Revenge – Swing Copters cropped up in March, and then Dong Nguyen’s Flappy Bird followup is hitting now, August 21. I’m not sure how that works. The phrase “Swing Copters” is fairly nonrandom, after all.

In Nguyen’s Swing Copters, you play as a little creature sporting a propeller cap and tap the screen to fly–slewing somewhat drunkenly side to side–upward through girder-like platforms that jut from the screen’s edges. Nguyen threw in dangling hammers that sway like pendulums and threaten to whack you as you motor past, just to keep it interesting.

Tube Revenge, by contrast, has you tapping to keep a tiny green pipe flying left-to-right, Flappy Bird-style. knocking into orange-colored creatures to score points while avoiding black ones. Unfortunately the game hung half the time I brought it up, and kept trying to send me to something called Boom Beach, so I’d give it wide berth.