Are you an expert engineer? Neither am I. Luckily you don’t have to be to play Bridge Constructor, although it will test your patience and knowledge of physics. The aim of the game? Simple. Construct a bridge strong enough to hold a pair of cars, trucks and single gas tanker. However, as I watched one of my bridges collapse and the tanker travelling on it explode, you soon realise this is not so easy!
The game equips you with four materials, wood, metal beams, concrete pillars and cables. The materials available to you varies level to level, with wood being the only material available on every level. I generally used wood to build roads and support my bridge in the early levels, with the other materials coming into play as I progressed through the game. These materials are then used in any pattern you choose to build your bridges road and its support to keep it up. I found myself using these materials in all different ways during the game, trying to figure out what works, and mainly what doesn’t!
Each level also gives you a budget to build your bridge, with each piece of material costing a price. When you reach that budget, you can’t place anymore materials unless you remove some! In the later levels this can prove very challenging and really puts your brain to the test.
While building your bridge, you can check how stable it is by pressing the play button. The game uses colours to indicate the strength of certain parts of you bridge, with green being strong and red being weak. Although I must admit, I found sending vehicles across and watching them crash as my bridge fell apart, a much more entertaining way of testing it’s stability.
Once your bridge is built and your happy with it, select the vehicles and pray your bridge holds. If the vehicles reach the other side, you will be scored on how much of the budget you used and the type of vehicle that you that made it across.
There are 64 bridges to build, split into two sets of islands. When you complete the first set of islands, you then unlock the gas tanker. You can then go back through previous bridges you have built, to see if they can withstand the weight of this heavy vehicle.
The only flaws with Bridge Constructor is it doesn’t offer much variety in level design. Neither does it offer many hours of gameplay or replay value, which is a shame as it’s an enjoyable game.
Although Bridge Constructor has been out for a few years on other platforms, it’s nice to see it come to Xbox. It’s a great puzzle game that will get your brain ticking. If you enjoy puzzle games and have not played Bridge Constructor before, I would recommend picking it up!
Simon contributed 16 articles to ICXM in 2015, covering game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news with a focus on hands-on impressions and verified-source reporting. Their bylines on the site span the Xbox One’s first full year of post-launch coverage, including the early days of Backwards Compatibility and Windows 10 gaming.