Swing Copters: Top 5 tips, hints, and cheats for the hardest game since Flappy Bird

Swing Copters is an obscenely difficult one-touch action game from the infamous creator of Flappy Bird. Steel your patience, because making it even a few seconds on your first tries without plummeting to your demise is a challenging feat.

See, in Swing Copters, you control a little orange guy with a propellor hat. It will turn on and pull him upwards, but veer off to one side unless you tap the screen quickly enough to switch directions. Given this disorienting dynamic, you have to guide him through gaps in girders that, for some reason, have hammers swinging beneath them.

If you have barely been able to make it past the first girder, check out our top tips, tricks, and cheats for surviving the gauntlet of Swing Copters.

1. Settle into a rhythm

It will take awhile before you find a consistent tapping rhythm for moving straight up with as little lateral deviation as possible, but it's absolutely vital to do before you even start worrying about steering towards the gaps in the platforms. To start, simply tap as quickly as possible, then dial down the speed bit by bit. Make sure to keep the time consistent between taps, even if it means bashing your head against the first platform a few times to get a feel for how fast you need to go.

Once you've found the rhythm established in the video above, you can work on varying the delay between taps to steer. It may help to use two thumbs to keep left and right switches oriented, but maintaining a rhythm that way is more difficult.

2. You have less room than you think

It's easy to focus on the gap between the green girders as your target zone, but realistically, your navigable area is much smaller. Focus primarily on the moving in the gap between the hammers, as there's only a small section of the beams that will potentially make that gap even smaller. Get through the hammers and your odds of making it past the girders are good if you stay steady.

3. Keep calm

It's hard not to feel like whipping your phone against the wall after a few rounds of Swing Copters. Odds are if you have any experience with Flappy Bird, you already know what to expect here in terms of rage, but letting it get out of control will pretty directly affect your ability to play. Even with Flappy Birds under your belt, many consider Swing Copters even more challenging and infuriating. Accept failure as an inevitability. Wax on, wax off. Turning off the audio will aid your sanity immeasurably.

Pic courtesy of the iMore forums

4. You get one swing

There's only enough time between girders to have one solid veer towards the gap. It's possible to squeeze in two shallow veers if the hammers are swinging in your favor, but that's rare enough to not rely on. The vast majority of your taps should be evenly timed to assure consistent assent. There is so little time to course correct before the next girder that you should aim to get the bulk of your transition done in a single swoop.

5. Hack a high score

If you're more interested in bragging rights among your friends than going through all of the toil of the game itself, it's relatively easy to fake a high score.

Install iFunBox on your computer
Plug in your iPhone or iPad over USB
Use iFunBox to find the com.dotgears.swing.plist file in Library/Preferences
Open and edit it with a basic text editor to change the value under the highscore line near the bottom to whatever you like. Just change the value between the "integer" markers.

Your top tips, hints, and cheats for becoming a Swing Copters legend?

Getting good at Swing Copters requires a tenacity that many don't have. What's your high score? How did you get there without taking a hammer to your iPhone? Sound off in the comments!