Except I wasn’t.įor starters, the tutorial had a grid system with points laid out in an obvious pattern to walk you through. This is quite strong, and by the time I hit the first level I felt ready to take on anything.
To my surprise, some of the steps it walked me through were failures to show why and how certain support systems don’t work and how to fix them. A standard bridge from point A to point B, double decker bridges, and hydraulic lifts, all with different types of materials to work with. There were several types of bridges the game walked me through. A lot of other games struggle to realize the disaster of making players wait within the first ten minutes or so, but despite it being a tutorial, the game allowed me to control what I was doing and didn’t stagnate in the process. No menu, no options, it tossed me into a scenario and walked me through step-by-step. The other game I like to call “Tiny-miner-man-on-a-moped death simulator.” No matter how I look at it, Poly Bridge was a fun challenge wrapped in a package that’s far more exciting than the premise lets on.Īs I fired up Poly Bridge for the first time, it threw me right into the tutorial.
On one hand, it’s an unassuming and adorable puzzle game filled with pleasant music and a charming aesthetic. If you can master the physics you’ll have a blast here.Poly Bridge works as two different types of games. For fans of the genre, the tool-set presented here and the abundance of challenges to get sunk into is great, but some may be left with a bitter taste in their mouth. Poly Bridge’s peaceful atmosphere, achieved with the combination of its beautiful polygonal art style (which, might I add, has a lot of variety throughout), slow methodical gameplay void of time constraint, and chill music, directly contrasts with the frustration its bridge system creates. Have nothing to do with this game, because it’s about bridges Then again, perhaps I’m just bad at the game. I’d spend half an hour creating my magnum opus of the bridge building world, only to watch it fall down faster than a straw house next to a huffy puffy wolf. Poly Bridge has 10 levels giving you the basic rundown on the skills and materials you’ll need, from basic triangular wooden support to hydraulic drawbridges, and I found myself revisiting these levels a lot more than I should have needed to. Whilst a common feeling of perplexion is experienced in most puzzle games before you reach that ‘light-bulb moment’, I don’t know whether it has done enough of a job of explaining its mechanics, and that ultimately ended up in frustration quite a lot. My main issue with Poly Bridge is that I spent most of my time with the game thinking ‘what am I doing wrong?”. A dangerous game of Kerplunk with severe consequences. Many a time did I find myself ever so slightly over-budget, anxiously removing wooden support beams one by one only to then watch my questionable construction buckling under the pressure of a camper van. You can even slow down and speed up the simulations if needed, a feature I used frequently in order to identify the pin-point weaknesses in my structure. The gameplay is similar to Mario Maker, in that you can switch seamlessly between the grid-based building mode and playback, watching your machinations play out before your very eyes. One day we’ll hear about the Switch’s online infrastructure…
A largely successful port of the PC version, Poly Bridge on Switch does miss out on the Steam workshop community, but that isn’t any fault of the developer. Much like the last game I reviewed, Mom Hid My Game!, there is an elegant pointer system for those who wish to scrutinise their masterpieces on the big screen. With over 100 levels and a sandbox mode (that allows you to really get creative with the tools provided), there’s a lot to get stuck into here, and it utilises the Switch’s fancy new capacitive touch screen by allowing you to pinch and zoom your way to victory.
The trial and error difficulty curve may lead to frustration, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.Ī niche puzzle game, Poly Bridge is one that fits the Switch console well, in that it is easy to drop in and out of, and benefits from sharing with others. Poly Bridge, from developer Dry Cactus, brings the bridge-building genre onto the Nintendo Switch for the first time, and may just scratch a puzzling itch that you never knew you had.