Angry Birds developer make a Flappy Bird clone… with planes.

Let me get this straight… Rovio, who made the wildly popular Angry Birds games have decided to make a new game that rips off Flappy Bird… and decided to use planes instead of birds? What?

That’s right – the company have just launched Retry on the iPhone app store in Poland, Canada and Finland in what TheNextWeb are calling a “soft launch”. It’ll presumably be rolled out to everywhere else (including the UK) as soon as all of the bugs have been spotted by players in these smaller markets.

The game itself is as close to Flappy Bird you can get: not only is gameplay centred around tapping the screen to avoid obstacles, but Rovio have even opted for retro 8-bit style graphics.

But damnit, what is completely mad is that the ‘characters’ are planes – why didn’t they make Angry Birds star in Flappy Bird? Wouldn’t that have been a license to print money?

One of the reasons for the lack of Angry Bird branding might be to do with the big money hole where profit used to be. Whilst Rovio are still profitable, they’re not making as much money as when Angry Birds was the big in-thing a few years ago… Perhaps Retry is an attempt to diversify their portfolio?

Similarly, the game also marks another subtle shift in strategy: whereas the Angry Birds games all required you to pay up front, Retry is instead free to download – but with potentially lucrative in-app payments inside (though goodness knows what you might want to buy in game?).

We’ll let you know when it is available over here.