Paper Wings Offers High-Flying Experience

Paper Wings is a mobile game in which you control a variety of birds to collect yellow pellets to stay alive. You avoid red pellets and complete assigned tasks to unlock new birds.

Simplistic, Minimalistic Style

First and foremost, Paper Wings is gorgeous in its simplicity. It takes on an origami-esque style for the birds and its background. Everything has very simple shading and is surrounded by bright colors. As you advance in stages, the time of day changes and the colors are just as phenomenal. There’s a very calming effect to everything in the game that makes time just fly by while playing it.

There’s actually no music in the game. It took me a minute to actually realize this as the silence is filled with nature sounds. Rather fitting for a game about birds, actually. Sound effects, like the wing beats and splashing into the water, are satisfying and lets you feel like you’re really in control of everything your bird is doing.

The Controls

When I first started to play Paper Wings, I’ll admit I didn’t like the controls. In line with the simple style, there are only two ways to control your bird; tapping either side of your screen. Tapping the right side tilts the bird down, while the left tilts the bird up. Doing this also builds and decreases the bird’s speed, respectively.

I really tried to think of a way to improve this, but I couldn’t come up with anything. The controls just make sense. They are also where the challenge comes in. At first, the controls might feel overly simple and take away from the gameplay.

However, as you continue to play the pellets fall in a less obvious pattern. If you miss one, you have to try to maneuver your bird back to it before it sinks before the screen. If you don’t, your bird explodes into a ring of feathers.

While the controls might take a while to get used to, once you know them, you can really take off and take plowing through the stages.

The Best Part

My favorite part of this game is easily the birds. As a lover of all avian creatures, it’s nice to try to unlock all of the different species. It’s almost like bird-watching. You start as a dove, then move up in rarity.

While some of the birds are really easy to unlock, like the pigeon, which is unlocked almost immediately upon opening the game, others, like the macaw, take massive coinage. You can earn coins by playing the game, watching ads, and completing other tasks listed in-game.

The ‘Meh’ Part

My only real criticism of the game is, after a while, gameplay becomes stagnant. No matter how fast the stages go by or how fun they are at first, you’re still just flying from left to right collecting pellets. No amount of background changes or extra birds will change that.

You can argue that is part of the package of mobile gaming, but it’s still a valid criticism. By no means am I saying this makes the game unplayable. It just makes me want to take more, and longer breaks each time I pick it back up.

Still, the game is really fun and I don’t see myself removing it from my phone anytime soon.

Paper Wings is available on Google Play.