I was a huge fan of Bridge Constructor when it was first released for the iPhone. I probably put in almost 100 hours into the game before I finally deleted the app to save my sanity. Then I got a review copy for the Xbox One, and I have since earned every achievement in the game by perfectly building every bridge, never once completing a bridge by pure luck.
Alright, most of my designs worked with a mixture of luck and wizard-based voodoo. The game was fun and drew me back in long enough to complete everything there was to do. Now, Headup Games has released the sequel, Bridge Constructor Stunts. I could not wait to jump back in.
The first thing I noticed was that the two games are very different from each other. While Stunts shares the bridge building mechanic from the first game, the main goal has now changed for the more extreme version. Instead of building a bridge over a river or chasm, I had to build a ramp to launch my tow truck through the air. While in the air I could flip around and catch stars and screws–the main collectibles of the game.
The change is not at all jarring. It is a mostly natural progression that makes sense to anyone who played the original. First I laid out the concrete portion of the ramp, then placed all of my support beams, then ran a test to try and make it to the finish line. In this version, I also got to control the car itself instead of just watching the cars roll over my creation.
The handling of the car was a lot like the motorcycle game series, Trials. I had to feather the right trigger in order to adjust my speed on the launch, then tilt my car back and forth using the analog. Landing upside-down caused the car to explode, making me restart the level. The mixture of controlling the car and building the ramp before the jump was a lot of fun. It made each level feel like a fresh puzzle that I had to sort out.
The game is not very long. If a player did not want to collect all of the stars and screws, only get enough to unlock all levels and beat the game, I could not see this game taking more than a few hours to run through. I don’t think this is a bad thing, as Bridge Constructor Stunts is more Bridge Constructor for the fans. Fans of the series will spend a ton of time revamping every placed piece in order to ensure they collect every star and rise up the leaderboards.
The game shares the same cartoon art style of the previous entry in the series. The sound design and interface are pretty much the same as well. I would have liked to see things look a bit more distinct from the iPhone version, though. While nothing looks or sounds bad, it all looks just alright. Since I know I will continue to spend hours staring at my screen, I would have liked the visuals to be a little more Xbox and a little less iPad.
I also ran into a few glitches while playing. The most frustrating was on the fifth level, I deleted the entire track in order to start again. Once I deleted the track, the drivable concrete would not return. When placing pieces of the track, the game automatically designates the top layer of wood as “road” and all the other pieces as support. However, the game stopped recognizing the “road” sections. Instead it only put a flat line of supports, which my car just drove through.
I tried everything I could think of to bring it back like building, rebuilding, deleting, repairing, driving, everything. The only solution I had was to delete my save file and start all over again. Luckily this was only level five, and it never happened again after that. The only other glitches I noticed was one hardcrash to dashboard and I sailed through a couple screws but the collision detection did not award me the item.
I have spent over twenty hours in the game so far and I have never noticed any screen tearing, frame rate drops, or controller lag. And like I said before, the glitches were few and far between, with the worst one only happening once, and I couldn’t recreate it.
Summary
Anyone that finished Bridge Constructor and thought they wanted more to do should pick up this game. If you are new to the series, the question becomes if you want a puzzle game, or a physics-based car jumping game. I really like both entries in the series, but it really comes down to what the gamer is looking for. Either way, I do not think you can go wrong with picking up Bridge Constructor Stunts.
Joshua was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 42 articles across game reviews, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative.