When I first saw this game a few months ago, I was thrilled: a free, side-scrolling shooter game for Android and iOS which has a lot of similar elements from the two previous Kakao Games that I had played and reviewed in this blog! I thought it was the perfect combination of Magic Pang's cute style and Dragon Flight's gameplay, and as if that wasn't good enough, I personally love witches ... put any girl with a magic hat on a broom and I'll be there.
The Basics
Before you start, make sure to check out the game settings. For example, there is an option to set the game to play left->right or right->left.
When you start a game, one of your five lives is used up automatically. You will get a new life every 9 minutes. In 'Ranking Mode', you will get a tutorial on how the controls work, but it's nothing advanced. You touch the screen up, down, left, right. Enemies will approach but the character shoots automatically so the only thing you have to worry about is making your fire power hit the enemies before they hit you.
There is a total of 6 stages as far as I know. Each stage is divided in three parts, with one boss each. The first boss is slightly easier, while the third one is called the "King boss". When you defeat him, you will be rewarded with a Bonus Flight where you can collects lots of stars and coins. Gold coins are worth more than normal silver coins.
The goal of the game is, like with most mobile games, to either survive for as long as possible, or to get the highest score. You'll need to level up your Character's weapon to get ahead. Try to earn as many coins as possible from your flights. Max Character Level is LV.20.
After each flight you will get 5 seconds to continue by paying coins or crystals. (This is something I do not recommend as I have regretted it every time). When the counter reaches 0, you will see your result, and the Boss Badges will reveal how well you did on each stage.
Flight Items & Power-Ups
When you kill an ememy, your Fever Meter at the top will increase. When the gauge is filled up 100%, you will automatically enter Fever Mode, in which you are invincible for a short period of time. To get the highest score, try to hit all enemies. You will shortly go back to normal.
Killing enemies will also give you items to collect. Candy gives you points, Coins gives you money, and Stars fills up your Power Sphere at the bottom. When this Power Sphere is filled up 100%, touching it will make your cute little witch girl transform into a witchy woman with amazing powers! But make it count, in just a few seconds, you will go back to normal. This ability can be really useful on bosses, where there at times will be a lot of stray bullets to avoid. But the charge item will be nullified during this time.
The jumping pumpkins are especially interesting because killing one before they exit the screen will award you with a special item. These are the four items you can get:
*Magnet: All items are drawn towards you. (MAX level: 9 secs)
*Power Shot: Makes your attack stronger. (MAX level: 9 secs)
*Shield: Protects your character. (MAX level: 8 secs)
*Wing: An eagle helps you charge through enemies. (MAX level 3.5 secs)
Sometimes you get items from other enemies as well, but it's very rare. What item you get is random, and for how long the items are active depends on how much you've leveled up your broom. Max Broom level is also LV.20. This means each item can be upgraded 5 times. But you can't choose to upgrade one item at the time; it's automatically updated in the above order.
Pets
In this game, pets are your only accessories. You don't have any other equipment, except for your broom. Luckily, in comparison to new brooms, pets are fairly cheap. But you can only get help from one pet at the time, so make sure it's a good one!
To see your pets, go to the bottom right button, below your Level-up screen. To buy a pet, select the green star. You can choose from rank C-D pets for 2000 coins or A-B pets for 20 crystals. Just like in all Kakao Games so far, crystals are rare, so I use them wisely. I have bought only one expensive pet because the best way to get high rank pets is through merging.
Merging pets is easy. Select the pink star and add one pet to each Sphere. You can only merge two pets from the same rank. To get an B-rank pet, you must merge two C-rank pets. To Get an A-rank pet, you must merge two B-rank pets, and so on. There are two levels above A, which cannot be bought with crystals but only achieved through merging. The higher the rank, the higher the merging cost.
There are four different kinds of pets that I know of so far: passive, offensive, defensive and special. Each pet has its own set abilities and a short back-story written on its info page. I might translate these in the future.
Clover Meter & Shop Items
Before you start a game, you can also choose to buy different power-ups.
* Start Dash: 300 coins. Makes you charge through the first part of the game.
* Increase Wing Charge: 1900 coins. Never tried it but I guess it's self-explanatory.
* Last Fever: 300 coins. When you die, you get a last chance of getting more points.
* Auto Transformation: 700 coins. You automatically transform when hit.
* 1 extra heart: 1 crystal. Gives you one extra hit.
* 3 extra hearts: 5 crystals. Gives you three extra hits.
* Relay: 1000 coins. Two characters can be used during flight (edit in character settings).
* Surprise: 600 coins. Get a random bonus feature (i.e. x2 coins).
You can also get most of these items by picking a card from the Clover Game. You might also get crystals, coins or a free pet! The Clover Game opens only when you've filled up the Clover Gauge. When it's filled 100%, the Gauge will reset, and there will be a new number inside the clover as seen in the screenshot above. You can also see a list of ways to fill it up. I might translate these later, but the easiest way is to get a new high score.
Adventure Mode
Not long ago, WeMe made an update to the App, adding this new mode to the game. You will be asked to fly short missions, where you will have different objectives.
Adventure Mode is divided into different worlds with 12 stages each. For each stage, you use up 1 life, except for boss stages where 2 lives are used. Some of the worlds are based on the different enemies from Ranking Mode. I will make a new update on the Adventure Map in the future when I know more.
For each completed mission, you get two rewards: First you get rewarded with a maximum of three Star Badges, depending on your score. Second, you get to play a light version of the Clover Game! Win Coins or Clover Gauge points after normal stages, and Coins or Pets during boss stages.
In comparison to Ranking mode, you get a Heart Gauge instead of a single hit. The Heart Gauge is decreasing automatically during flight, but you get Hearts during flight to fill your Gauge. The problem is getting more hearts in time! Some stages may be easy, while other stages are more difficult. Luckily, this new mode has its own Level-up system so even if you have MAX level on your character since earlier, you can still improve. And before each mission, you can buy Hearts or Sphere Fill to help you.
Evaluation
For me, this game was love at first FLight.
But the more I played, the more I noticed that the game has downsides:
1. The difficulty in not really a problem as long as you are able to level up. But when you reach MAX Level in both Broom and Attack, you will have no choice but to buy a new character or a new broom. The problem is, getting new characters and brooms are way too expensive. This is a huge downside which made me lose interest in the game after a while.
2. At first, I thought there was a pattern to which pets you combined, resulting in a specific pet, but it turned out it doesn't really matter. It would have been so exciting, trying out different combinations, so that you had to remember some kind of evolution logic. So the lack of that also made me really disappointed. Getting higher rank pets takes a lot of effort. If combining two B-rank pets would always result in an A-rank pet, the time and money spent would have been worth it. But if you get a new B-rank pet, you've just wasted thousands of coins on nothing. Fixing this would not have made the game too easy, because there are still a lot of coins involved in the combining process.
3. I was excited when The Adventure mode came, but I think it would've been better if lives were only wasted when you actually fail a mission. Despite the new Level-up system, getting ahead can be difficult and replaying old missions to gain experience doesn't seem to work very well. And why did they add an Auto Control option (next to the heart Gauge)? I am still new to this mode so I might update this info in the near future.
Conclusion
As a whole, I like it. After all, I still come back to play more of this game, especially now that they have introduced the new mode. Nice items, good looking characters and graphics. The sound is mediocre but the speech makes it better. A neat Level-up system with cute animals as helpers. Despite the downsides, I think we all agree the world can never have enough shooters!
( last updated 2014-03-28 )
Download
You will need Kakao Talk to play this game. See my previous blog entry.
You can download Flight Girl from Google Play here or from App Store here.
Flight Girl is created by WeMe so all credits to them!
PLEASE NOTE: I did NOT get paid to make this blog entry, this is entirely my own initiative. I decided to blog about Kakao Games to make more people outside of Korea to notice them.
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