Amazing Copter is a perfect example of a retro game, with a pixelart aesthetic and chiptune music that wouldn’t be out of place on the Sega Master System. 

But it’s also a perfect example of how the casual arcade genre has evolved over the years. 

Time was, side-scrolling shooters only came in one flavor—a flavor that tasted a lot like R-Type, with a heavily armed craft flying horizontally from left to right and blasting waves of attackers to smithereens. 

Amazing Copter, by contrast, contains a multitude of influences, from the bounce-along control interface of Flappy Bird to the unlock-everything gameplay loop of Crossy Road. 

Gameplay-wise, Amazing Copter is like a floatier, more violent take on casual titles like Whale Trail. Levels scroll automatically from left to right, and you stay in the air by holding your finger down on the screen to ascend and lifting it off to descend.

As you fly along you’ll have to dodge missiles and bombs while collecting as many coins as possible in three different cave biomes.

Once you’ve amassed a hoard of coins, you can spend them on a huge variety of different helicopter skins. In fact, one of the goals in Amazing Copter is to unlock as many skins as humanly (helicopterly?) possible. 

By the way, your skin collection is synced to the cloud, so you don’t have to worry about any of your hard work going to waste. 

The other main goal in Amazing Copter is to beat your own highscore and climb the leaderboards in pursuit of arcade glory. 

Aiding you in this quest for immortality are a range of rad power-ups, as well as the option to continue each run by spending some of your coins (or watching an ad for free). 

To learn more about Amazing Copter just head to the official site, or visit the game’s Discord server to see what the latest buzz is.

Or you can just download it.

Amazing Copter is available right now on the Google Play Store. It’s totally free, but if you want to support developer Gammes you can make a donation through Ko-fi.