I wanna fly, a new action title from Woodland Games, is currently listed on the Nintendo eShop for $2.42. Not $2.99, or $2.50, or $2.49 or even $2.40. Its exact price is $2.42 and not a penny more. Or less. Sadly, that's probably the most interesting thing the game has going for it.
The experience doesn't offer much in the way of explanation, but it also doesn't need much. When you first load the software, a brief series of panels present the story--like a comic book--of a penguin who wants to fly and catches a ride aboard a rocket ship. Then he bails, and he must "fly" back to Earth by flapping his wings a lot as he avoids a sky full of hazards.
Minimalism is the order of the day in I wanna fly. The main menu lets you adjust settings (you can turn off the game's single looping song, disable sound effects or view the development credits), or you can spend in-game currency unlocking available characters or even play the game proper.
A round begins right as your fall commences, from a point near the top of the screen. Meteors, angry birds and rockets cross your path. You can hold the A button or tap it rapidly, depending on how quickly you want to gain elevation. Think Flappy Bird, except the tiniest bit more sluggish and with things scrolling vertically rather than horizontally. Keeping your finger off the button causes you to drop more quickly, though you can neither descend nor ascend quite as quickly as sometimes you might like.
Besides playing with the Pro Controller, you can also undock the game and use the Joy-Con controllers or even just tap or hold your finger against the screen. I found that I had the most success playing in handheld mode with the Joy-Cons, as my finger otherwise got in the way of the action. Playing on a larger screen works fine, but then you have to keep your eye on a lot of digital real estate if you have a huge screen.
As you plummet toward the ground far below, coins also float across your path. These are frequently positioned in such a way that grabbing them puts you at risk. The coins tend to come at the middle of meteor clusters, or they attract the worst of the swarms of smaller birds and the giant turkeys you'll encounter. So if you're trying for a lengthy fall, you have to condition yourself to ignore shiny things.
Characters require quite a few coins to unlock. Your early runs probably won't net you more than 3 or 4 coins on average, but longer ones might get you closer to 20 or more. It takes 100 coins and a distance traveled (in a single run) of 250 yards before you can access even the first character, a dull astronaut. The "bat" character, which is clearly modeled after Gotham City's finest but without a trademarked name, requires you to reach a certain rank first. There are a lot of other characters after that, running the gamut from superhero knockoff to celebrity to zany mascot, but the requirements are so steep to access some of them that it's difficult to imagine most people bothering.
Though it's not available on 3DS at the moment, I wanna fly feels like it would have been been a better fit for that older platform. There's nothing particularly ambitious or technically demanding about it, and the style of play is best suited for small spurts of activity to kill down time between more interesting activities. It could also work great on mobile devices. On Switch, it feels just a little bit too simplistic to stand out in the middle of an already diverse software library. I wanna play something else.
