Bridge Constructor Review

Bridge Constructor for PS4 is the first attempt to bring the popular PC game and genre across to home consoles. The game is developed by Clockstone, a developer mostly responsible for mobile titles.

Bridge Constructor is a puzzle game, front and foremost. It tasks players with building a bridge stable enough to sustain vehicles travelling over them. The game is made up of a few different overarching areas that all have smaller individual levels in them. The idea being that you are building bridges across a country, and facilitating the travel for the vehicles you use to test the bridges out. It’s a small touch that at least adds some kind of purpose to the building of the bridges.

The bridges are built using a variety of materials including wood, cement and metal wiring. The sturdier the material, the more expensive it is. An spending limit per bridge is where most of the challenge emanates from, forcing players to build safe but also cheap bridges. In some ways it almost feels like you're put into the shoes of a cash strapped country, trying its hardest to build cheaply and efficiently.

There are three different levels of difficulty for every challenge, which are presented through three different vehicle choices. The first two, a car and a van, are available immediately but for those players who wish to play through again with a tougher challenge there is the lorry option. These types of vehicles add the extra challenge of weight, forcing players to construct more creative and supportive builds in order to carry them across safely.

Levels vary with the type of material they expect and also the layout of the bridges themselves. Some will expect players to erect cement towers in the middle of them, whilst others make things a little harder as there is no structural support point.

The building physics can be a little bit weird sometimes, and what you think might make sense, likely won’t. This is where there’s a bit of a weird learning curve as you have to learn the games idea of what physics are, rather than your own preconceptions. It’s not long before the lack of tutorial becomes very apparent, while you are taught how to use the materials, you are never really shown how to manipulate the physics. This becomes especially noticeable as you delve further into the game.

The game’s weakest aspect is definitely the UI. It’s incredibly awkward to use and often makes building the bridges far more awkward. Rather than a dedicated button for swapping between the different sets of materials, players must go back into a menu in order to swap. While this does seem like a minor niggle, over time it starts to become quite irritating. It’s a serious design overlook and something that I’m surprised wasn’t picked up during testing. Bridge Constructor's visuals are also a point of scrutiny. The graphics and art style are incredibly simple and the title actually looks more like a mobile title than a console one, which makes the experience far more juvenile. I also found myself disliking how the game plays with a controller. It is clearly designed to fit either a touch stylus or mouse, because of this, accuracy and usability are greatly affected when using a controller.

Bridge Constructor on PS4 is a title that tries to port the popular genre over to console, unfortunately, poorly designed controls and a lack of tutorials mean the experience falls short. Players are never properly introduced to the game's physics, which makes the experience far more frustrating than it ever needs to be. It’s incredibly hard to recommend this title over any one of the hundreds of bridge builder games you can pick up on mobile.