Buy The Blue Flamingo

It's true that The Blue Flamingo's handcrafted model world is its winning asset, immersed in a full thematic ambiance, but it's also a cohesive, functional shooter. It offers a simple risk and reward system of either buying upgrades or waiting for more cash. Enemy animations are tight, leaving little room for error and with only one life, you'll need to stay vigilant. As a low-cost time waster, it does its job beautifully.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKnKQGX2THQ

Read the full review: http://www.noobfeed.com/reviews/1104/the-blue-flamingo

While the mechanics seem simple the fact that things kind of fluctuate and that you have a big bulky ship make this feel clunkier than most SHUMPS. You'll be trading money you earn that is your final score against your upgrades, wile you can buff your ship, you'll be trading in your place on the leaderboard. Something fun, different, cheap, and quick to play.

While it is pretty to look at, The Blue Flamingo is rather underwhelming as a game.

1) Control lag and movement inertia. I hope you don't like having fine control over your ship. It makes the game vastly less enjoyable to play as a result.

2) Enemy design is incredibly basic. There's a lot of the same enemy from the last level, who flies the exact same way and shoots the exact same way, over and over, level after level. There are even enemies that litereally do nothing but take a bunch of hits. Nothing remotely interesting starts to show up until you've looped the game around six times.

3) Weapons are dull and uninteresting. Leveling up your shot only increases fire rate. No shot type selection or variety to choose from.

4) Color selection. In most games of this type, certain colors are reserved for important information (such as enemy bullets), so they are always visible and clear. The nighttime cityscape background breaks this basic design rule, as bullets and enemies blend seamlessly into the background colors. Lucky for us enemy fire is absurdly predictable.

5) Menus ignore your button config; you always have to press enter to do anything regardless of what you set for your action buttons. Also they use blinking text to show what you are highlighting, meaning you have to wait a second just to see what you're actually selecting.

In conclusion, The Blue Flamingo has sloppy controls and uninteresting gameplay. Not recommended.

If you're looking for good shmups on Steam, I can recommend: Crimzon Clover, Kamui, Jamestown, Alltynex 2nd, Astebreed, Danmaku Unlimited 2, Ether Vapor Remaster, RefleX, and Satazius.

This is a nice top- down arcade shoot em up game!

You are in command of this interesting design craft that shoot bullets, missiles and bombs to destroy your foes. But be very careful and destroy or avoid touching any enemies as your flying vehicle take quiet a fair bit of damage every time you get hit by a projectile or by touching the enemy craft. After all, you only have one craft.

Every time you destroy an enemy you get points and $$ or a coin (seems to have more value) if you actually manage to destroy a wave of enemies before disappearing out of the screen.

At the end of the level you can upgrade your bullets or booms with the money you earn.
I really like the feel of the sceneries and the game fluidity. Well executed and nicely polished. And for $4.99, how can you go wrong?

One slight downside is perhaps the gamepad sensitivity (it is maybe an issue with my Logitech gamepad) but you get use to it fairly quickly.

Positives:

• Nice and challenging Levels
• Addictive
• Leader board

Negatives:

• No achievements
• Gamepad sensitive

A must have in your games list!

A top-down Shoot em up, or shmup, shooting things enemy crafts, or missiles, and avoiding other things like bullets, structures, or other crafts. That's about it really, and for asking price and what it is, I'm satisfied with it.

What i really like about the game is the graphic style with how most of it is hand made in real life, and then recaptured to play in the game. With the graphics, the soundtrack is just fun and nice to hear, really goes well with the game's name which I find extremely amusing for some reason. The gameplay videos on Youtube doesn't do the game justice in terms of how the game actually looks like, it really does look nice.

The gameplay, the shooting itself is nothing special but it's good, it's a normal good shmup. You get bullets, missiles, and a bomb that will destroy everything on screen, where you only get one or two at first in a level. A few variety of enemies/objects to shoot at, and a few different levels (don't know how many but going to say five max). Also, I'm not sure if there's a boss to kill at a certain point as I haven't lived long enough to confirm it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZNNc8H8AAo

As I mentioned in the begging, for what the game is, and it being reasonably good, I think it's well worth it and I'm happy playing it.

Shameless link to original post.

A very simple airplane shooting game, nothing really special about it, but the handmade models in the game amazed me!

Perfect for those who like to chase the highscores. For me it was all about the art, lovely art!

The Blue Flamingo is a bit of an experimental game. Not gameplay-wise but in the way it was built. You see, the game was built entirely using handcrafted models. Effects, explosions and rocket flares were all made with firecrackers and other pyrotechnics and objects like cars are being pulled forward by strings with magnets. It’s really ambitious. But does ambition automatically produce a good game ?

At its core The Blue Flamingo is a shoot ‘em up, meaning you control an aircraft that you can move across the entire screen and by pressing (and holding) a button you’ll shoot bullets (or drop a bomb) while enemies keep approaching in waves. After a few levels the speed in which these waves approach will increase and things get more hectic. If you’ve ever played a shoot ‘em up before you’ll notice the game doesn’t really reinvent the genre. Except for one thing: scoring points.
By killing groups of enemies successfully you’re awarded a coin that you can pick up by moving your aircraft over it. These coins act as your score.
At the end of each level, of which there are just two (day and night), you get the opportunity for some target practicing. Targets will move across the screen in all kinds of directions and it’s your job to hit them all. I’m not sure what happens yet if you hit them all, but I’m sure it awards you extra points or maybe even a bomb. Let it be clear that there are no boss fights in this game.
After each level you can invest your collected coins to purchase upgrades (which will then lower your score with that same amount of money) or you can decide to continue without purchasing anything and then receive interest over it. So do you want to spend money on upgrades in the hope that you can earn it back or do you take the risk and hope that your current aircraft will do the trick as get you as far as you can. It can be a difficult choice, especially later on when levels get harder and harder.
Upgrades are limited to better guns and extra bombs by the way. So you can’t make your aircraft fly faster or give it extra armor.
It’s an interesting concept but there aren’t any real rewards. It’s just to get a better high score. And while this might be enough for some people for me it isn’t. If you introduce a risk & reward system I want the reward to something better than just a better score. Give people new skins, different aircrafts or different guns, things like that; something to play for and something that keeps people coming back. But then again, for a small game like this it’s understandable. I just don’t think people will play it for hours and hours, which is a shame considering the amount of effort was put into creating it.

I’m not going any further into the graphics, at least, not so much. Most of the things I wanted to say about it have already been said anyway. The game has a unique look, but because of the filming of the backgrounds things have become blurry, unfortunately. This was to be expected and I’m not blaming the developers here. It was an artistic choice and that should be respected.
Sounds are basic and the music doesn’t really fit the game as far as the atmosphere is concerned, but there’s nothing really wrong with it.
And the controls are smooth and navigating the screen works just fine without any problems. Collision detection is also good.

In the end Might & Delight managed to give us a cute little shoot ‘em up with The Blue Flamingo. It gives us a unique choice on managing our scores but ultimately falls short because it doesn’t really offer any replay value except for the fact that you can beat other people’s high scores (or your own) on the leaderboards. A bit more variety and content rarely ever hurt a game, but for this price we can’t really complain. Just don’t expect anything revolutionary here.

[Rating: 64/100]

The Blue Flamingo is a pretty unique looking shoot em up game. The hand crafted models and backdrop create a really memorable experience! The music is fitting and I find it quite enjoyable, the sound effects are fine (love the bomb one!). The controls are tight and fully remappable, even those on your gamepad. The game recognizes my universal gamepad without a hitch - I wish, I could say the same for all those "full controller support" AAA games on the market.
As a classic shoot em up, The Blue Flamingo uses a top-down view. Enemies come from the top in waves and try to shoot you down, although I have not seen any homing projectiles yet and most of the enemies just fire straight forward in a line. That's easy to dodge, if you're just trying to survive, but if you want to get a proper highscore, things can get hairy, as you try to kill as many enemies as possible. You have a bomb, that as far as I know, clears all enemies on screen, and has a significant cooldown after deployment, so use wisely!
Killing all enemies of a wave ( usually they are all from the same type) will drop a coin on the screen, that is way more valuable (I think), than just single kills, so going for a full wave annihilation will be your top priority.
i have only reached level 6 for now and have seen 6 different enemies + 1 flying obstacle. The different combinations of enemies, and your urge to kill them all to get the coins, create a reasonably entertaining / challenging experience.
The damage you sustain to your plane "The Blue Flamingo" is permanent, and, I think, all enemies do equal amounts of it.
At the end of each level there will be target practice for that extra burst of dosh ;) Targets will fly around without damaging you, as you try to turn them all green by shooting them. Shooting a target repeatedly will alternate it's color (red->green->red).
The interesting economic system for the upgrades / highscore, will make balancing your greed a tough decision, and probably will require a lot of experimentation.
Since the game is all about the highscore, I would love to see a bigger scoreboard, as the current one only shows 5 rows on screen, but maybe that's just me.

TL:DR you can check my overview video, where I reach level 6 :
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=343853387

The Blue Flamingo came out of nowhere. Like, literally appeared on the Steam store with no prior acknowledgment to its existence, somehow having been developed in secret alongside developer Might & Delight's upcoming Shelter 2.

What The Blue Flamingo is might be even more unexpected, that being a highscore centered shmup crafted entirely out of real handmade models. It's probably right above saxophone simulator and multiplayer only FPS on the list of games I wouldn't have envisioned coming out of such an esoteric studio, but here it is and, well, it kind of bums me out to be here writing this review.

I don't mean to imply that The Blue Flamingo (let's just call it TBF from now on) is an awful game, but it's rather hard to dismiss its extremely limited design and dull construction as anything but underwhelming. Consisting of a single level (repeating indefinitely until you die, with only the lighting changing between rounds), TBF is immediately repetitive to almost sleep inducing extremes. Enemy types are few and introduced agonizingly slowly, beating you down with hundreds of the same uninteresting baddies that are only so threatening as to the unpredictable number which are forced on you at a single time.

The almost random difficulty spikes creates an annoying cycle for a game for which the only objective is obtaining as high a score as possible, removing the feeling of satisfaction that you managed to achieve a new record because of your skill, as it's possible you simply got a lucky draw early on. The pitter-patter of your ships bullets colliding with an enemy provides a rather unexciting effect of clearing a screen, feeling somewhat akin to firing a squirt gun at a paper airplane. I enjoyed watching my enemies explode as much as I typically find it entertaining when things go boom, but the actual act of causing them to combust never caused me to elicit even a marginal level of interest.

There are further issues I could touch on about TBF, like the tendency for enemies to blend into the background or how removed characters seem from what they're flying over, but I don't think it's really necessary and criticizing games made by developers I have a strong affection or is never fun. Might & Delight has always had trouble connecting their artistic visions with compelling mechanics, and that's never been more apparent than in what is easily the most gameplay driven and forgettable game they've ever made. I remain hopeful for what the studio does next, but I strongly hope it plays more to their strengths instead of some persistent, crippling weaknesses.

Full disclosure: The Blue Flamingo was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer.

Good Stuff:
Nice art direction
Arcade focus
solid gameplay
Customizable controls

Bad stuff:
No bosses?
Upgrades don't really feel like they do much
limited amount of levels

http://youtu.be/rAUS4QXNB1A

This is a game I REALLY wanted to like, but...

The art is gorgeous, the main reason I bought the game without checking ANY reviews. I just dig that handmade look, just what I also loved in The Swapper and The Dream Machine. But where as The Swapper and The Dream Machine are actually great games, with great design, The Blue Flamingo unfortunately isn't, and it's a shame, it really is. The look and the soundtrack had a great foundation, especially from athmosphere point of view, but the game and level design part fails hard. It is just boring to play, unsatisfied. I hate to be this mean with my assumptions, but to me it almost looks like the developers have not played a lot of classic shoot 'em ups, haven't got what makes those games great. The controls feel also somehow a bit off, also collision model. But those are minor gripes compared to the downright bad level design.

Buy it for the art, but don't expect to enjoy it more than 10 minutes.

a liiiiittle laggy off the cursor keys, but graphics, atmosphere and explosions all highly satisfying, great way to kill the lunch hour

Story
Blue Flamingo does not try and get fancy with a crazy story about an elite pilot taking on an entire army or a prototype jet that needs to eliminate and evil alien race. The premise is that you are a pilot and you come to shoot some flying objects and get a high score … so you do. It keeps it short and sweet. Get the high score and compare it to your friends and the world on the leader board.

Visuals
This game looks beautiful! There are gorgeous desert landscapes that you fly over with excellent details that you probably miss as you focus on dodging bullets and missiles. The game essentially has 2 levels; rust colored desert landscape and a dark blue night flight. The design gives a very steam punk feel. Almost like you are playing in the world of Lost Exile (Look it up. It is a great series. See pic below). All of the graphics for the bullets, ships, environment and explosions are crisp clean. The simplistic color palette, crisp details and beautiful environments are the highlight of this game.

Van Ship

Audio
There are two soundtracks in this game. One for each level. They match perfectly with the overall theme. On the rustic southwest level you have some old time guitar rifts that fit right in. The colorful night level has a more upbeat jazz sound track that makes me continually want to dance my ship across the screen when there are no targets. The sound effects are really crisp. I feel like I can hear every nut and bolt ping off the rocks below.

Controls
There is not much to say about the controls in this game. They are simplistic controls that use 1 joystick for navigation with 2 buttons to attack. They were very responsive and need to be as the game gradually progresses from simplistic shooter to bullet hell as you complete each level.

Gameplay
The gameplay is very simplistic and also very clever. The idea is to get the highest score which in this game is represented through money. You collect money by shooting down aerial objects. You also collect coins when you shoot down “teams” of targets. You get bonus money at the end of each round by testing your skills in target practice. All of this is pretty standard fare for a shooter. Blue Flamingo has one caveat that makes that quest for the highest score that much more interesting. At the end of the level, you have the option of spending your points to upgrade your weapons. By upgrading your weapons you stand a better chance for surviving. The problem is that you just spent a chunk of your score to have a better chance at the next level. You also collect a small amount of interest on your money while playing. So if you choose to improve your plane than you also choose to make less money on the points that you have already earned. That simple twist makes this game endless fun. It allows you to try new methods of spending your points to maximize your overall score.

Overall
I definitely give this game 4.5/5.0 Bricks. The catchy music and beautiful environments make this simplistic shooter a joy to play as you find that perfect balance to achieve your high score.

For more go to http://brick-media.com/blue-flamingo/

Beautifully made levels and models, nice jazzy music, and an interesting upgrade system keep your score to rise on the leaderboards quicker or spend it on temporary ship upgrades.

BUT...

1. There are ONLY TWO levels: day and night. These loop over and over and introduce new & harder enemies and patterns.
2. There are NO bosses or mini-bosses. You have the level and then a short "target practice session" at the end of a level
3. The keyboard controls are very loose
4. There is no proper fullscreen 16:10 support, only 16:9 stretch

It's hard to say no since it's only $5, but do know exactly what you are buying. As the store page notes, it's a pretty, pretty simple shooting game.

The blue flamingo is a top down space shooter well top down stratosphere shooter, you control the blue flamingo. Every now and then, pilots from all over the world join to challenge each other in a big competition. They take turns finishing a dangerous track filled with foes, hoping to dominate the score table.

You will fly and shoot your way to the top of the leaderboard, your vessel the blue flamingo has 2 attacks your missiles and your bomb. Through the levels you will encounter various enemies ranging from satellites to missiles and girders. Killing enemies gives you money and sometimes enemies will drop coins giving you even more money, the end of each level you will have a chance to spend some of that money on upgrades.

The game has a very interesting look as most of the in game units are actual models that were photographed and ll the effects, rocket flares and explosions were created using firecrackers and other pyrotechnics. All of this gives the game a really unique look and feel.

The game seems difficult however the story is basically none existent meaning the game is not something you play for story it is a fun shooter game to play and try and beat your score.

I have not experienced any crashes or bugs and overall the game is fun there are no bosses or mini bosses though meaning at the end of a level you may feel a bit unfulfilled.

taking all of this into account I believe the game is a 6/10 fun if you like top down spaceshooter/ stratosphere shooters but not a must buy.
original post
http://gamingmalarkeyreviews.wordpress.com/2014/11/22/the-blue-flamingo-review/

The Blue Flamingo is an extremely unique and one-of-a-kind shoot-em-up!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ_7ORsHCtc
The set and ships are all real-life models built by hand. This is the sort of detail you normally only see in films and it add's a fantastic feel to the action. The Dev's have released a 'Making Of' video and I would recommend everyone to watch it. Shoot your way through intense levels with a swiftly increasing difficulty, in a world completely built with handcrafted models. Invest your score in upgrades, or save it to gain interest with the risk of losing it all. - Very Highly Recommended!

Kind of a ♥♥♥♥ shmup but real pretty; would recommend.

beautiful and fantastic game from might and delight!

This game has a wonderful atmosphere

The art is very pretty, the art direction is great. However the menu interface uses a 1990s era "blink" interface to tell you what's selected, there is no real story and generally feels rushed. Neat concept, great art, big failure in actual execution of the "game" part. Others have said it is "very simple", I tend to agree with that. Not a whole lot beyond the good graphics unfortunately.