Kings Can Fly is today’s Amazon Free App of the Day (3/5 stars, all ages).
The premise is simple: The King has a fleet of blimps and it’s your job to get them safely through the maze-like environs of his kingdom in the sky. You do this by strategically placing fans so that the blimps will change direction as needed to get through the mazes. This is very simple at first, but as the mazes become more complex and you have to start using fans with special behaviors (e.g., fans that can create a whirlwind to make a blimp change directions) or worrying about multiple lines of blimps traveling in different directions simultaneously, things get a lot trickier!
Kings Can Fly only has an average review rating of 3/5 stars, but I checked out those 1-star reviews myself and found that most of them are complaining about issues I’m not seeing when I play the game myself. For example, many of the 1-starrers say the game loads upside down and cannot be made to turn right side up. On my Fire HD 7″, the game did initially load upside down, but rotating my Fire 180 degrees solved that problem.
Another common complaint from negative reviews is that the game isn’t challenging enough, or that gameplay isn’t varied enough, but that wasn’t my experience at all. Granted, I don’t tend to play a lot of very complex games, or games that demand rapid reflexes, but to me this game is just as enjoyable as most physics-based puzzle games. Kings Can Fly is very similar to the game apps where you try to lay track for trains to get them into their stations without crashing into each other. I like that you can plan out your strategy and fan placements first, then see how it works. And if it doesn’t work, you can try again. It’s both fun and relaxing.
The only bug I found was that if you’re not connected to wifi the first time you start the game, you get an Amazon App Store error that tells you to re-download. I was concerned that this might be a red flag for spyware, if the game wouldn’t let me play until I was connected to wifi, but I found that turning on wifi, re-starting the game, and then turning wifi off again worked just fine. The next time I started the game, it loaded with no problems.
The graphics are very cute and the game begins with a great tutorial.
Kings Can Fly – try it for yourself, while it’s Amazon’s Free App of the Day!