Andreas Illiger‘s Tiny Wings dethroned the long-reigning Angry Birds from the top of the iphone charts.
The subject is quite alike, a cartoony bird with a simple physics engine.
Though Tiny Wings packs no porcine enemies nor hard to understand controls.
On the contrary. The game has a very simple goal. It is to guide an overweight tiny bird from an island to the next as fast as possible. The problem: the bird cannot really fly, and must pick up speed by sliding down a hill and then slingshotting up the next. The sole control is the act of not flapping the wings, thus zooming down the slope a bit faster.
And that’s it. Rhythm of the flight soon becomes second nature.
Combined with a flawless execution, bright graphics, a very casual pace (a game is over in a couple of minutes) and un-annoying sounds, the game proves that a huge team and a sky-high budget are not requirements for success.
The only demerits to Tiny Wings are its truly one-trick-birdy nature and the lack of GameCenter integration. The latter is being addressed already, and the former is exactly the point of the game.