Player Preview - Poly Bridge

Title: Poly Bridge

Developer: Dry Cactus

Status: Early Access

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1LGXGqa

Steam Page:  http://bit.ly/1RUMUMC

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the physics based bridge building game, Poly Bridge, where the aim is to get vehicles safely across your bridges and structures.

The game is a pretty chilled out experience, there are no timers so you can build at your own speed and the games music provides for a very mellow atmosphere. The tools you are given to build your bridge will depend on what is available for each mission with some materials being unavailable in some circumstances to make it a little bit more difficult. The constant will always be road pieces as they are the only element of the bridge that vehicles will be able to drive on. Obviously just building a road over a ravine won’t be enough to support itself let alone a vehicle traveling across it so you have a bunch of support materials that you can use to help that. Wood is your most basic support material being cheap but not all that strong and is best used to create this kind of criss-cross pattern that is almost a requirement for every bridge that you will create. Steel supports will help support bridges with heavier loads travelling across them or help support landing impact from some of the stunt jump levels. Cable is the final form of support for overhanging structures that have no available base support options.

A big aspect of many of the games levels is creating splits in the bridge to allow boats to travel underneath. You can mechanize the split with pistons that will raise or lower the split joint in your bridge to allow both land and sea vehicles to travel over and under your bridge. Some of the later levels though this mechanic somewhat breaks. The mission will ask for a split in the bridge to allow for the boat crossing but you can just build your bridge up and over the boats crossing which is not only easier to construct but also a lot cheaper allowing you stay way under budget. This could be enforced however with the addition of a road height limit that prevents you building over the obstacle rather than actually building the split. The game already has levels that restricts the amount of road tiles available to you so it could maybe even take advantage of that system in these kinds of circumstances.

The jumping levels I found in Poly Bridge to be the most entertaining and required a little more thought to be put in to support the on landing impact. The monster Truck level in particular had me stuck for a while and not the bad kind of stuck were you feel you have exhausted all options, more like being stuck but still having a bunch of different elements you can still play around with. Eventually I managed to get the supports somewhat working and by somewhat I mean that bridge was definitely a one use only structure that fell into the water just behind the truck, but it got the job done.

Apart from the predetermined 60+ levels that you can play through the campaign or main game, Poly Bridge also has Steam Workshop implemented so you can download and play other players creations or even create your own through the sandbox level editor. If you ever have a moment in the game that you want to save, whether it be funny, ridiculous or plane stupid you can create a short animated GIF straight from the game that you can choose to upload to the games gallery, a place where you can go to watch other players saved GIF’s, or even upload it to social media. While it is a rather odd feature it’s still pretty cool non the less and can help capture some of those really awesome moments in the game.

Other features of the game include a simulation speed slider that allows you speed up or slow down the simulation for better analysis particularly to see what breaks first on your bridge so you can fix it. There is also a stress overlay option that will show you the parts of the bridge taking the most stress colourized from green to red.

Altogether Poly Bridge is a nice relaxing game that although laid back will still require some advanced problem solving to succeed on some levels. The mechanics do become a little repetitive once you’ve played a lot of levels and is one aspect of the game that may struggle on the official level side of things however I imagine that the workshop levels will fill the gap here with more crazy level ideas. If you like physics based puzzle games, Poly Bridge is definitely worth a look and if you ever want to just sit back, relax but still be engaged, Poly Bridge offers that too.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Poly Bridge, the game is currently available via Steam Early Access. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for reading, I’ll see you guys next time.