Flappy Bird Is Gone – Never Fear, Pugo Is Here

What will we do without Flappy Bird?! We’ll have to dodge obstacles with Pugo, the latest and most popular “knockoff” of the insanely addicting app, Flappy Bird. The world has not ended when Flappy Bird was pulled from the app store on February 9. To the contrary, the market has been flooded with clone after clone, trying to capitalize on the Flappy Bird craze.

The premise of the clone games is the same as Flappy Bird: take your character and maneuver it around and through different types of obstacles. The ways the games differ is by the type and design of the character and where the game is set. In Flappy Bird, you controlled the addicting yellow bird while dodging green pipes. In some of the recent clone versions, the characters run the gamut from pigs, cats and sponges to bricks, worms and unicorns. In the game, “Flying Cyrus”, which hit No. 1 in the iTunes App Store, the game operated with the same mechanics and basic principles, except the bird was replaced with a version of celeb, pop sensation Miley Cyrus. Instead of dodging green pipes, Miley dodged wrecking balls.

Well, Miley and the “Flying Cyrus” are a thing of the past! The newest Flappy Bird clone is “Pugo.” Pugo is a pink quail that you fly through the forest. The game was created by Patrick and Camy Cabral, a husband and wife creative team. Pugo is currently the top app in the App Store. The free app launched Feb. 25 and holds a 3.5-star rating.

Yahoo Technostorm has review Pugo and feel that it delivers the goods, with only minor criticisms. They describe Pugo in relation to Flappy Bird as follows:

Pugo is basically a do-over from Flappy Bird—only this time with tasteful, seemingly hand-painted graphics, a catchy soundtrack, and a fresh gameplay mechanic that lets players earn an extra life by picking up a power-up in the form of a Philippine flag. Unsurprisingly, Pugo feels every bit as challenging, if not more so, as its inspiration despite its simplistic controls and having only one objective: to score as many points as possible by navigating obstacles in a forest. After about a hundred playthroughs, we think it’s the more difficult game.

It’s not hard to decipher why so many Flappy Bird clones have hit the market. Recent reports show one-third of newly released iOS games are Flappy Bird clones. During a 24-hour period beginning on Feb. 26, 293 games launched in the App Store and 95 of those games were obvious clones of Flappy Bird. The clone developers are undoubtedly hoping to cash in on the meteoric success achieved by Flappy Bird, which was reportedly pulling in $50,000 per day. As we all know, the developer pulled the Birds because he claimed it was “too addicting.”

So whether it’s a Flappy Bird, or a pink Quail, kids and adults alike will have plenty of options if they missed out on downloading Flappy Bird.