I'm not here to bash other developers and their projects. However, we always hear about the Top 10 Apps, and we strive to get into the Top 100 and stay there. So what about the bottom of the barrel? I found the lowest ranking Adventure game according to AppTrakr, and coming in at #1251 I'd like to introduce Back To Fly Kingdom Lite. The full version is $0.99. The lowest ranking app must be an eye-gouging steaming hot pile of poo doused in frustration sauce. So I gave myself 5 minutes to check out the app in order to limit the torture and reduce my desire to throw my iPhone across the room. This also gave me a solid 5 minutes to see if I could FIGURE OUT the game. So I fired up 'Back To Fly Kindom Lite', or as I prefer to call it 'When the Hell Did I Go to Fly Kingdom the FIRST Time?'. I was met with some decent graphics, but no sound. Apparently they don't have sound in Fly Kingdom, but since this game takes place in space, where sound doesn't travel, I figured they were going for realism. So the first mission gives me 10 seconds to fly to the end of the level to find my fellow crewmates. PIECE O' CAKE! Ten seconds is like nothing, I can do a lot of stuff in ten seconds. It took me all of 0.9 seconds to die. Okay, the controls use the accelerometer to steer, a method of control that I am not particularly good at. But I wasn't going to let that stop me from getting to Fly Kindom. Besides, I still had a good 4 minutes of gameplay left. At 0.9 seconds per death thats... well that's a lot of deaths. And I'm determined. My second, third, fourth attempts were pathetic. I didn't deserve to get back to Fly Kingdom. However, on the FIFTH try, I really made some headway and survived 8 seconds. The first level was frustrating, the second level wasn't too bad. The third level is where I REALLY shined as I collected coins for fuel. No obstacles to kill me, unless I got really spazzy and fell off the screen. The fourth level was interesting. Now we are getting somewhere. These big balloons are threatening to fly toward a fellow crewmates yellow ship. OH NO YOU DON'T VILLAINOUS SPACE BALLOONS! I will stop you with... well I don't have any guns. What kind of spaceship is this anyway? I can use my ship to nudge the balloons off to the side, deflecting them away from the yellow ship. I never did pass this level, but I looked at the clock and I had been playing for a full 8 minutes. Overall this isn't a bad game. It gave me some frustration and at the same time some entertainment, and I will pick it up on whim just to see if my flight skills have improved. It certainly doesn't deserve to be at the bottom of Adventure. It was well worth my 8 minutes and I'd recommend it just so that others can see a different type of game that has been all but forgotten by the App Store. Fly Kingdom (the title listed within the game) was released in Aug 2009, which means it had to drop pretty drastically in order to beat out some of the earliest bottom dwellers.
Cheap marketing at it's cheapest. Kidding, I'm sure you're not associated with this game. Though, I really like where you went with this post lol.
No, I have no idea who the developer is, and I had never heard of the game before I looked for the lowest ranking Adventure Title. The title of this thread is somewhat misleading- lowest ranking doesn't equal 'worst', no more than highest ranking equals 'best'.
Cool hands-on preview of something I would have never seen otherwise! According to appshopper.com "Back to Fly Kingdom Lite" has 13 ratings, so they only needed 13 people that truly hated the game It's quite easy to get really low or really high scores with such a small number of votes. I can imagine most of the 1 star voters giving the rating out of frustration, there's been console games that were released with tiny but crucial flaw which made them unplayable for vast majority of people. One example that comes to mind is Lair for PS3, it lacked traditional joypad controls and the motion controls got it a horrible beating in reviews: http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ps3/lair It's scary to think that Factor 5 closed their doors because of that small bit of innovation, they had been doing similar flight games (Roque Squadron series) for many years and it probably was just a matter of flicking a switch to enable the traditional controls. - the good thing about App Store is that you can fix almost anything with an update. It would be interesting to find the worst rated game with at least 50 or 100 votes.
Yeah, that would be interesting. A game like that would probably be very glitchy, but somehow it had to make it through the approval process. I was actually amazed at the decent quality of Fly Kingdom, considering its low ranking and low ratings. He updated it at least once and the developer, Leung's Work, seems to be very prolific with the large number of games released. I've picked up games in the Top 100 and played them for less than 8 minutes, because that is all I could tolerate.
Hehe, interesting idea for a topic. Unfortunately, being lowest ranked has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with marketing.
Pretty funny. I guess you have to play the good, the bad, and the ugly before you can figure out what to make.
That might be why I chose to write this. I had a genuine interest in what the lowest ranked game played like. I went into it with low expectations but I found myself pleasantly amused. Marketing is important, and despite the best intentions of developers, this is the most crucial link that we are most deficient.
