The spiritual successor to Flappy Bird is here, and it’s hard enough to make you say some very inappropriate things even in front of your grandmother. Don’t worry! We can help.

Swing Copters is the new game by Dong Nguyen, who previously made the enormous hit Flappy Bird. Rather than flying horizontally, you now have to fly.

Maybe you were great at Flappy Bird. Maybe your high score was 250 in that game, and so you were expecting to dominate the leaderboard in Swing Copters. After all, the two games are similar. You guide a graceless character through some obstacles by tapping the screen. It’s basically the same thing, right? Well, one problem: Your Flappy Bird skills won’t translate into Swing Copters success. Instead, you’re gonna have to change some things if you even want to get past the first gate.

With that in mind, we’ve put together a few tips that may help you improve your score.

1. Set your expectations

Before you do anything, keep in mind that Swing Copters isn’t a game where you’ll consistently manage double-digit scores. Hell, I’m writing a tips guide, and my best round is only 8. While that might seem like a bummer, it actually means that you don’t need a 3 minute-long session to beat your friends. Try for 15 seconds. If you fail, try again. When you start getting past the first gate consistently, you can the start trying to figure out how to keep that momentum through the second.

Swing Copters is hard, but its short rounds mean you can actually start getting the hang of things without having to invest a huge amount of time.

2. Don’t spam taps at the start

Above: Just tap once at this point and then wait until he is airborne before tapping again.

When you begin a round of Swing Copters, the game prompts you with “tap.” This might make you repeatedly tap the screen to launch your character off the ground. Do not do this.

You just need to hit the screen once at the very beginning. You then wait for the guy’s propeller to start working until it lifts him off the ground. That’s when you should enter your second tap. By doing this, your character will always start by flying to the right, which makes getting past the first obstacle much easier.

I probably spent my first 15 minutes just trying to score my first point, and that’s because I wasn’t following this rule

3. Move with the hammers

Unlike Flappy Bird, Swing Copters doesn’t just have static barriers for you to move past. It also has giant hammers that swing on pendulums on each side of the narrow openings. This creates situations where it looks like you’re going to make it through, but those swinging obstacles get you at the last moment.

Well, if you want any success in Swing Copters, you must learn to move with the hammers. Yes, controlling the character is already challenging, but you’ll need to learn to dodge those big mallets as well.

Ideally, this means that you need to weave through the center of both hammers, but that’s probably too difficult. So here is a quick tip: Simply try to favor the side that has the hammer swinging out. If the right hammer is swinging from the center to the outside, you should then try to have your character on the right side of the opening.

4. Feel the rhythm

Flappy Bird had a distinct rhythm to it, and so does Swing Copters. You have to constantly tap the screen to change direction or else you’ll hit the wall or an obstacle. If you play long enough, you should naturally come to learn this game’s beat. But let’s give you a head start on that.

I’ve found that you need to tap the screen about every half-second when approaching the hammers. When moving through the hammers, you probably need to tap the screen three to four times every second. This will vary depending on whether you’re trying to correct your trajectory or not, but that’s a pretty good baseline to start from.

5. Don’t rapidly tap the screen unless you’re in a crisis

Whatever you do, don’t just slam on the screen with taps. You might think that this is a good strategy to quickly press the screen a dozen times to make sure you go back and forth quickly when you need to go straight up. That might work for a moment, but you’ll almost always lose control after doing this.

The problem is that hitting the screen even only twice in quick succession causes the character to pick up a ton of lateral speed. Before you have time to react, your little copter man will have already gone splat against the wall.

The only time you should ignore this rule is if you already feel like you’re going to lose control, and you just want to score that one last point to beat your friend. Building games like minecraft online. Sure, your game will end, but at least you can make that Hail Mary attempt before wiping out.

Swing Copters is not the mobile game we wanted, but it is the mobile game we deserve.Released last week by Dong Nguyen, is everything that fans loved to hate about his. Its Super Mario aesthetic hides a brutally difficult gameplay mechanic whose siren song is so compelling that players will continue to smash themselves against its rocks anyway.Playing it last week, I was struck by the apparent revelation that Dong Nguyen had embraced the darkness that had once threatened to destroy him. Swing Copters must be, I imagined, Nguyen's remorseless revenge on a cruel world, enacted with googly eyeballs.It wasn't much different than Flappy Bird, in theory. You manipulate a flying character through a series of gates. Score one point per gate passed; die if you collide with anything.To begin playing Swing Copters is to be utterly confused.

You tap to start the game. Nothing happens. Vegas city gangster logo. Your little guy's propeller hat starts spinning up. The second he launches into the air, he immediately goes veering off to the right, smashes into the invisible wall at the screen's edge before even reaching the first gate.

Game over: Your score is zero.Sure, maybe this happened to you the first time you played Flappy Bird, too. The difference with Swing Copters is that even after you die a couple of times, you still may have absolutely no idea what it is you're supposed to do to not die. Tapping the screen reverses your hapless propeller thing's flight direction, but he's going so fast that all you do is slam into the other side of the screen. Gears StudioAt this point, you begin to think: Am I just not getting this? Is there something else I should be doing? Are there tilt controls that adjust velocity? Does it matter what part of the screen I tap?(Spoilers below.)No, you just tap wherever.

Each tap changes the horizontal direction of Eyeball Guy's flight, but his rocket speed and monster truck momentum make it nigh-on impossible to even get aligned with the first gate—let alone negotiate through the swinging hammers that guard it.Eventually, after many a game, after questioning why you are even doing this when you could just be watching the Simpsons marathon, you luck out and fly through a gate without hitting it. In all of your excitement at finally scoring a single point, you instantly die. Your score is one.

You take a screenshot because this may never happen again. If you're like me, maybe you have some friends playing Swing Copters, too. You console yourself by noting that their scores, also, are in the low single digits. In an over-stimulated age where games give you 10 million points just for pressing Start, the fact that Swing Copters makes you fight brutally for each measly point is oddly refreshing.Then, Swing Copters disappears.No, it wasn't pulled off the App Store with great fanfare, in the way that Dong Nguyen killed his big hit when the internet abuse became too much to bear. Instead, what happened was that Nguyen—who I now, in my mind, was beginning to admire greatly as an evil genius—released an update that considerably softened the game mechanics. Friends began reporting ridiculous scores as high as 10.

That seemed just so unreasonable. I immediately became very protective of my original, unadulterated download of Swing Copters. I was getting pretty good at it! I had scored five! Was this to mean nothing?

I had been so comforted by the idea of Swing Copters-as-elaborate-revenge-plot. Now Nguyen was dialing it back?Loathe to download the update on my phone and permanently overwrite the Swing Copters I was used to, I used my wife's phone to play the new version (she does not share my admiration for the game). I was generally relieved to find that while, yes, I did double my high score instantly (the 10 felt cheap and tawdry), it's still a challenging game. It's just not so uncompromisingly brutal about it.Still, I shall not update my Swing Copters, as long as I can help it. It is a tiny protest. As a society we have largely traded in our Nintendo DS cartridges for iOS downloads, but in doing so we have signed on to a system in which games are as evanescent as cherry blossoms. At any time, they might be altered considerably with no simple (or entirely legal) method of playing them again as they were, or abruptly disappeared down the memory hole without notice.

It's hard to get used to the idea of games as single-serving disposable goods, as Dixie cups in place of fine china. Then again, I'm already starting to forget about Swing Copters.