Winging It

Delightful, and addictive "owl-em-up" with a fun retro-wave aesthetic and soundtrack. Manages the difficult feat of being easy to play, but difficult to master, with a well-designed difficulty curve: challenging without being too frustrating especially for people bad at video games (me.) A very relaxing time, especially for five bucks.

Winging it is a momentum-based autorunner about pathing through collectibles and hazards while managing a stamina resource. It flirts a bit with score chase elements, but the absence of leaderboards or a robust level select doesn't push you to replay for optimization. Instead, it focuses on a low-punishment instant-restart play loop that make it more suitable to be a soothing time-waster. That, combined with a set of variable upgrades for each playthrough make it a good candidate for a game to revisit from time to time over a period of months or years. That and its 0.5 GB size for a pleasant addition to a portable gaming platform, like a Steam Deck.

It is not easy. I like it. There were no bugs or errors found while I was playing the game.

Simple to understand, a bit of a challenge to get through. Wasn't bad for a free game.

GOOD.

"Winging It" is a rather mediocre ripoff of Flappy Bird (yeah, the absolute state of "indie" amateur developers right here). What do you do in the game? It's Flappy Bird, with a lame little glide mechanism, but ultimately the gameplay is pretty much the same. Don't be decieved by the poor quality low poly assets. All you do is Flappy Bird stuff. In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D visuals which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games. It's free... now, but it wasn't before. The developer was charging $5 USD for this. Imagine charging $5 for a Flappy Bird ripoff. Price barriers, especially on low quality products, can be a direct cause of failure. It's a nice gesture for the game to be given away for free, but it also tells us that the game wasn't good enough to succeed as a paid product. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players (on day 0, who would then write a bunch of sus reviews), and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. Take the review score of this game with a grain of salt. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.

I got to beta-test this game-- it's really cool to see how many new features they added between beta and release. The game is very easy to pick up and understand, and the levels are short enough to pop them like Pringles. The art style is cool and low-poly, with bold colors and sharp designs. The little running lizards are hilarious. The ladder of progression makes this one of those games that you just want to do "one more level." Also a great game to step aside and let your partner or kid try a few levels without ruining any progression. Really fun and friendly game.