App of the Week: Flick Kick Field Goal
January 01, 2012, By Craig J. Heimbuch 0 comments
I don't play a lot of games on my iPhone or iPad, but the ones I do play tend to take over my life completely, if temporarily. Had I not gotten a phone call, I might never have escaped from the vortex-like suck of Flick Kick Field Goal by Pik Pok.
Like any of the games in the flick-control genre, Flick Kick Field Goal has about the simplest controls imaginable. Just line up your finger behind a digital football and flick. Easy-peasy and completely addicting. Play in three different modes—Practice, Precision and Sudden Death—each with its own addictive qualities.
In Practice mode, you kick and are moved around the field, with different angles and varying winds, for an infinite number of tries.
In Precision, you are scored on 20 balls and rated for your accuracy based upon where your 'kick' goes through the uprights. Dead center is 100%, just right or left, 75% and close to the uprights, 50%. A missed kick counts for zero, and your score is aggregated into a total-accuracy percentage. I played for more than an hour last night, and the best I could do was 72%.
Sudden Death has already taken more than 90 minutes of my life, and I only downloaded this free app last night. Basically, if you make it, you get another kick. You miss, you're out. You can get extra chances if you split the uprights. The scoring is one-to-one, meaning you get one point for every field goal made. That is, unless you kick three perfect kicks in a row, in which case your ball lights on fire, and the scoring increases in value with each kick until you miss. The first firey kick gets two points, the second, three; the third, four; the fourth, five, etc...
So when you find yourself comparing scores with all the guys in your office, a three-digit score can mean one of two things—a whole bunch of kicks made or fewer supremely accurate ones made. Either way, with winds changing from zero to six MPH, the angles varying from hashtag to hashtag and some kicks more than 60 yards in range, it's pretty tough. I went on a tear and scored 141 points, and then, to follow up, played nine games in a row in which I didn't score 20.
Even now, fifteen minutes since my last game, I can almost hear it calling to me. My iPhone is sitting on the desk next to me and it's taking everything I have not to pick it up and play. Maybe I should put it in my drawer? Give it to a friend for safe keeping? Simply remove the app? No. No way. This one is sticking around for a while, and waiting in line at the BMV just got a whole lot more interesting.
