Common Sense Media Review
Physics-based diving sim with ads and purchases.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 9+?
Any Positive Content?
Where to Download
Videos and Photos
Flip Diving
What's It About?
FLIP DIVING has no story beyond making people from different walks of life (a professional diver, a karate expert, a man in a business suit) dive off cliffs and other absurdly high locations. The idea is to correctly perform various tricks from higher and higher elevations, thus earning gold coins while avoiding belly flops and backflips. Coins are used to buy additional tricks, divers, and diving locations; players can also buy tickets with real money and use those to purchase additional items or watch ads to earn in-game currency. Though the controls are simple -- just tap and hold to tuck -- timing is everything, and it's not as easy as it seems to dive successfully.
Is It Any Good?
This is less a game than an amusing little time-killer, but its slow progress, ads, and purchases make it less-than-ideal for kids. It's easy to imagine making a 10-minute line at the bank more tolerable by making a rag-dollish diver go "sploosh" but less easy to imagine doing it for hours on end. And while it's fun to get the hang of performing a perfect backflip or pike, the reluctant reward system means there are literally hundreds of dives ahead of you before you can unlock more stuff. What's even more annoying is that you don't get to choose what to unlock: Though you can scroll through different characters with "Get" buttons, you still have to spin a wheel to spend your coins, which gives you a new character at random, not one you choose deliberately. You can watch videos to get things faster, but the number of videos you have to watch to unlock that female diver is excessive -- yes, ONE female diver. What, women don't dive? In the end you won't be playing Flip Diving for the audio-visuals since the graphics and sound are no more than adequate, but if turning a guy in a penguin suit into an Olympic-level diver sounds good to you, you're in for a rare treat.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about in-app purchases. What are your rules for buying things in a game like Flip Diving?
Talk about advertising in games and the products being sold. Help your kid become a critical thinker about marketing.
App Details
- Devices : iPhone , iPod Touch , iPad , Android
- Pricing structure : Free (with optional in-app purchases)
- Release date : August 20, 2016
- Genre : Sports
- Publisher : Miniclip.com
- Version : 2.3.4
- Minimum software requirements : iOS 8.0 or later, Android 2.3 and up
- Last updated : February 15, 2023
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