Get Bigger! Mola (iOS)
When Flappy Bird hit it big with its simple but addictive score-focused play, many other developers were quick to try and cash-in with their own twists on the concept. The simplicity of Flappy Bird was almost one of its biggest downsides though, the game offering little to keep the player coming back to it besides trying to beat your previous high score. Get Bigger! Mola is a game that takes the basics of Flappy Bird’s play design and improves on it by adding in goals to shoot for, unlockables, and even a clear end point to play to try and reach on top of a mode for chasing high scores.
The mola mola, also known as the ocean sunfish, is one of the stranger looking large fish in the ocean, but despite this, the cartoon art style of Get Bigger! Mola manages to make them look rather cute, the player even able to unlock different costumes for the mola mola like a pirate costume, angel costume, or even have it take on the shape of different creatures like a shrimp or jellyfish, all costumes having different stats and perks. Control in Get Bigger! Mola is as simple as tapping the screen, the fish moving forward on its own but constantly dropping down towards the bottom of the screen where it will perish if it lingers too long. Each tap of the screen will cause it to swim up a bit, the player needing to tap repeatedly to keep it swimming around safely while also needing to maneuver around the other larger sea life. If you can’t find a good opening between the sea life though, you do have the ability to do a dash to knock foes away, the amount of dashes limited for each play through to encourage careful maneuvering.
Survival isn’t the main focus though because, as the title suggest, you want your mola mola to get bigger, and to do so, it will need to eat any jellyfish it comes across along the way. Eating a jellyfish will increase the size of your fish during a run, but the player will also be gradually building up jellyfish as a currency between runs, the player able to purchase different upgrades and outfits with it. The upgrades have the most obvious impact on your success, this being the way you can earn more dashes but the player can also increase things like how much each jellyfish is worth when eaten, how much bigger you get after eating one, and how close you need to be to food for it to register as eaten. There are even some abilities that can keep you alive longer like decreasing how close enemies need to be to hurt you or increasing a chance that you might just randomly defeat hostile sea life you touch. Many of the outfits for your mola mola are also purchased with jellyfish, some like the King Mola doubling the amount of jellyfish you collect, the Ghost Mola able to take an extra hit before dying, and the Space Mola having a magnetic effect to pull in food. In addition to these there is also another way to earn small benefits with Buddies, the mola mola able to bring a small partner into the ocean that provides extra effects. Some make sense like being followed by plankton, a baby penguin, or a tropical fish, but then weirder things like a syringe, piece of candy, or a tofu rabbit can be your buddy too, each buddy packing extra effects like increased growth or movement speed. While stat upgrades and skins are bought directly, the buddies involve paying jellyfish for a random chance at a new one, but the only way this free game is monetized are the appearance of advertisements and a not at all necessary option to purchase the jellyfish currency.
One reason you never really have to worry about your jellyfish income comes in the form of the game’s missions. Get Bigger! Mola features 100 different missions that you can do for some quick currency, the player getting them one at a time and the missions doled out randomly after you’ve done all 100. The missions come in two main formats, that being achieving a set goal in the span of a single run or achieving that goal across multiple runs, and in these two formats we have a few different objective types. Some are as simple as eating a set amount of jellyfish or jumping enough times, some involve hitting milestones like growing your mola mola to a certain size, and some want you to eat the special king jellyfish a certain amount of times before giving up their rewards. There are a few duds in this mission structure, since dying a bunch of times or using the dash a bunch of times both are better done by failing a bunch of times in a row instead of actively playing, but most of them give you a secondary goal to shoot before besides just making progress. Most of the missions just crank up the numbers for these mission templates, but this is likely to match your gradual betterment as you learn how to get deeper into the game and have the upgrades needed to succeed. A few of the outfits you unlock are even missions in themselves, the king jellyfish costume for example wanting you to scarf down a large amount of that special jellyfish type across the course of your many runs.
The different options give you a bit to think about before starting a run and the upgrades and goodies give you something to always shoot for even if you end up failing a swim through the ocean, so already Get Bigger! Mola has something to strive for as you play that keeps things progressing at a good pace. As you eat during a run though, the hostile sea life like shrimp, sharks, and stingrays gradually get smaller and smaller compared to you, and the bigger your fish is, the more options it has for what it can eat. While jellyfish are the only food that provides the game’s currency, once you’re big enough, you can eat anything else to keep growing, the game dividing play into a few stages where new enemy types appear. It’s incredibly easy to tell if you can eat something or not too, as anything that will kill you is highlighted in red, turning to more natural colors when it has been added to your menu. Getting through the stages is helped even further by the game having a clear end, each mola mola costume having its own ending that, while not very different from each other, gives you something extra to do. The English in the game isn’t always quite there though, grammar and spelling mistakes easy to find but everything is still easy enough to understand despite this.
There are no obviously unwinnable arrangements of sea life, so it can be possible to get to the end with any mola mola on a first go, but the upgrades make it much more likely and survivable, and once you’re powerful enough, getting the ending can almost become guaranteed during a run so long as you don’t get complacent with controlling the fish’s movements. To keep things from drying up after you’ve got all the endings though, the first time you beat the game unlocks an Infinite Mode where things will go on until you die. While normally you beat a stage by growing to a certain size, Infinite Mode will switch the stage to a random new one when you reach a size milestone, meaning you can go from eating whales to being smaller than shrimp again despite your constant endless growth. You can’t complete missions in Infinite Mode though, but the jellyfish you collect in it are acceptable currency. It will take you some time to complete all the missions, see all the endings, and get enough jellyfish for all the unlockables, but even once you’ve completed the game’s many objectives, Infinite Mode is a nice way to satisfy the same urge its inspiration Flappy Bird did with score-focused play.
THE VERDICT: This undersea twist on the Flappy Bird formula injects so many different goals to shoot for on repeat plays that it makes for the exact kind of game that is enjoyable to come back to again and again. Get Bigger! Mola at its simplest is about eating jellyfish to grow bigger so you can eat even larger ocean life, but on top of this simple goal are missions, unlockables, upgrades, and even endings that all give you new things to shoot for and little boosts to make repeat playthroughs feel different and have different potentials for success. The presence of many clear objectives means you can always be working towards something even when you fail to complete a run, Get Bigger! Mola both generous enough to make completing everything possible without spending a dime but remaining a decent enough challenge that you do feel like you earn the unlockables and upgrades.
And so, I give Get Bigger! Mola for iOS…
A GOOD Rating. Get Bigger! Mola is the good kind of clone, taking the original’s controls and concepts and building upon them to make them something much more interesting and enjoyable. While the language flubs and a few weak mission designs aren’t all the way there yet, most everything else is an improvement over Flappy Bird, the sea life that makes swimming precisely a challenge later turning into the ways you fuel your growth a satisfying sign of progression even before you factor in the many upgrade systems and unlockables. It sets up a clear ending to a run while also making sure that progress can be made in your failures, so even if you can only play the game for a minute or two, you’re feeding into your gradual growth as a player as you try to make your growth as a mola mola easier. If there had been more curated content like even more levels or a greater variety of missions Get Bigger! Mola could have been an even more enjoyable time waster, but its current form gives plenty to shoot for, the later challenges more difficult and requiring greater time investment without straining the simple gameplay design to the point it could become frustrating. It’s fair and fun, all while pushing forward the genre of Flappy Bird clones with some much-needed depth that doesn’t sacrifice accessibility.
Get Bigger! Mola could have just blended in with the countless Flappy Bird coat chasers, but it took the idea and built off it to make the style it was copying more broadly appealing. Score chasers and completionists alike both have something to shoot for in it. With a few different variables to tinker with before starting a run, different types of players can grow their mola mola in the way that works best for them without it completely losing that challenging edge.