Developer: BoomBit
Publisher: BoomBit
Platforms: Switch (2), Android, iOS, PC
Tested on: PC
Build a Bridge! – Review
As much as we enjoy sinking our teeth in meaty games like Digimon Story: Time Stranger or Star Wars Outlaws, sometimes we feel the need to play simpler titles, as a palette cleanser of sorts. One such game is Build a Bridge!, a title we’ve been playing in short bursts in between more intense gaming sessions. The game originally debuted on mobile, but it bridged the gap to a Steam release last month. As we’ve seen in the past, with titles like I*Chu and Mad Skills BMX 2, mobile games don’t always translate well to PC or console. Is Build a Bridge! an exception to this?
Story
As the game’s title so aptly indicates, Build a Bridge! is a game that is all about building bridges. While there is some visual storytelling present here, with the game taking you from Antarctica to the Orient and even into outer space, there is no actual narrative in the game.
Graphics
For as simple as Build a Bridge!’s cartoon visuals are, they’re easily the game’s most appealing element. The cartoonish in-game models aren’t exactly highly detailed; they’ve been reduced to their bare essence while still being recognizable as monster trucks or ambulances. Combined with the bright, saturated colours, however, this simplistic aesthetic emphasises the light-hearted nature of the game. It also makes it easy to simply accept the absurdity of the situations. You don’t question why you’re trying to get a fire truck to jump over a gap towards penguins, you just do it. Building bridges is done on a 2D plane, with the game shifting to a 3D perspective once you put a vehicle in motion. Being a mobile title, Build a Bridge! isn’t too demanding and performance is as smooth as you’d expect.
Sound
When it comes to audio, Build a Bridge! is either completely silent or needlessly loud. There are no separate volume controls, probably owing to the fact that the game originally debuted as a mobile title. Most people don’t play games on their commute with sound on after all. If you decide to turn off the game’s audio, you’re not missing out on much. The sounds of bridge construction are lacking in impact, and the game’s music feels like it belongs in an elevator instead of on a construction site.
Gameplay
At first glance, Build a Bridge! seems like a very simple game. All you need to do in this physics-based puzzler is get a car from point a to point b across a gap. As the game’s tutorial shows, that’s as effortless as laying down some road, reïnforcing it with some wood and then moving the vehicle across. Easy, right? Well, not exactly. The gaps that you need to overcome become increasingly elaborate: it isn’t long before you’re building a ramp for a monster truck to jump across or are hitching your bridge to a hot air balloon. The game’s core concept remains the same throughout, but within that concept, Build a Bridge! pushes things to their creative limit. Levels are bite-sized, and you’re given a rating of 1 to 3 stars depending on how cheap you can build your bridge. Each level also has a set of optional side objectives to strive for, such as making the vehicle jump a certain distance or excluding specific materials when you build your bridge. These objectives don’t have to be checked off on the same attempt, so you can play each level multiple times, each time focusing on a different objective.
While Build a Bridge!’s concept is simple enough, its execution leaves a lot to be desired. The mechanics are supposedly built around physics, but in practice solving a level involves less critical thinking and more luck-based trial and error. One or two minor adjustments can lead a bridge to collapse, even when this doesn’t seem logical. Fortunately, your bridge doesn’t need to be good, and it doesn’t even matter if it collapses while the car is driving across: as long as you reach the end goal, it’s all good. This approach fits with the absurdist, light-hearted atmosphere, but anyone hoping for an actual engineering challenge is out of luck. It doesn’t help that the game only explains the basics of bridge-building. Even side-goals like “reach x height” leave you guessing whether it’s the vehicle or the bridge itself that needs to hit that target. As a final insult to injury, the game’s hitboxes aren’t as polished as they should be as there were several instances where vehicles simply clipped through otherwise stable road parts.
Even in the PC version, Build a Bridge!’s roots as a mobile title are obvious. Microtransactions and advertisements may have been removed, but the game’s pacing hasn’t been adjusted accordingly, and it often feels like you’re forced to grind the game’s tougher challenges just to progress through the basic levels, as you can’t buy your way out of any roadblocks. The game’s control scheme didn’t survive the transition from touch screen to mouse fully unscathed either. There were instances where mouse clicks simply didn’t register, for example. Annoyingly enough, the game’s tutorial shows an icon of a mouse but said icon blocks your own pointer, so you can’t click where the game tells you until the tutorial icon moves out of the way. The only real advantage the PC version of Build a Bridge! has over the mobile version is its price point. At €9.99 for the game including both the Oriental and Outer Space expansions, it’s significantly cheaper than the free-with-microtransactions base game where those same expansions will set you back €17.99. With the end result being this wonky, however, Build a Bridge! is tough to recommend even at that cheaper PC price point.
Conclusion
When playing a puzzle game feels less like you’re solving a puzzle and more like it’s a combination of trial and error and dumb luck, then that game clearly didn’t understand the assignment. Like the bridges that you build yourself in the game, Build a Bridge! may look like a solid and sturdy product at first, but then quickly collapses in on itself. The idea behind the game is fun enough, but the wonky physics, awkward controls and poor pacing make it clear just how unpolished the end product is.
No Comments