The new Roku City screensaver game has me hooked - and it's free to play

Artie Beaty/ZDNET

ZDNET's cardinal takeaways

• Roku's caller crippled lets you alert a spaceship done Roku City.
• The crippled features iconic landmarks and Easter Eggs.
• You play utilizing your Roku remote.

The adjacent clip you crook connected your Roku TV to find thing to watch, you mightiness get wrapped up successful an impromptu gaming league instead.

On Monday, Roku launched a caller interactive crippled that you tin play consecutive from your location surface called Roku City Dash. If you're a instrumentality of Roku City, this is 1 you'll privation to see. 

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The crippled is acceptable successful Roku City, the celebrated screensaver that's adorned Roku products since 2018, and features iconic buildings from past iterations, Easter eggs, and more. All of your favorites are here, including the volcano, oversea monster, robot attacking the city, and lighthouse. The nonsubjective is simple: support a spaceship flying for arsenic agelong arsenic you tin (my existent precocious people is 568, if you privation to compete).

How to play

If you retrieve the viral Flappy Bird craze from astir a decennary ago, the gameplay volition beryllium precise familiar. You usage your Roku distant to play: Just property the up fastener that bounces your spaceship from its existent position. You can't determination backward oregon forwards, oregon adjacent up and down; you tin lone bounce. The crippled gets faster arsenic you go, and ends erstwhile you clang your ship, either into the Roku City skyline below, randomly placed magnets hanging from above, oregon different spacecraft heading successful your direction.

On much than 1 occasion, I had a bully crippled tally extremity due to the fact that my oculus drifted to thing successful the inheritance alternatively of focusing connected the incoming obstacles. If you conscionable privation to sightsee, I recovered that if you hold astatine the precise opening erstwhile the crippled tells you to "Press ^ to jump," you tin spot everything without having to interest astir keeping your spacecraft aloft. 

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It's reasonably casual to get to the 200-point threshold, but things rapidly ramp up from determination -- to get overmuch farther, you'll person to skirt oversea monster tentacles and h2o towers. 

The crippled is beauteous simple, truthful it's not 1 you're going to walk a ton of clip on. Still, if you unrecorded successful a competitory household, I tin decidedly spot families spending acold excessively overmuch clip trying to apical each other's precocious scores. 

How to effort it 

To get started playing, look for the Roku City Dash advertisement connected your location screen. Click connected it, download the app, and you're each set. Once it's downloaded, unfastened the app with the play/pause fastener from your location screen. Additionally, you tin entree it from your TV's Roku City screensaver.