It may be possible to get one testing vehicle through to the end, but attempting to get eight in a row to the finish may require some alterations. Solving puzzles using lumbering construction feels out of touch with Portal’s traditionally precise and tight puzzle solutions.īridge Constructor usually has a variety of vehicle types that test a player’s bridge-building skills, but Bridge Constructor Portal sends a convoy of the same single vehicle along the roadway for the ultimate trial. Bridge Constructor Portal’s Platinum trophy can be obtained without ever worrying that you might be building too much. The trophy list doesn’t even introduce any budget limitations. Currently the astronomical budget number at the top of the screen has little use outside of personal bragging rights. The Cake is a LieĮven if Bridge Constructor Portal doesn’t want to impose building restrictions, global leaderboards could help with challenging players to build more cheaply and elegantly. I was consistently captivated by the Portal puzzle elements as I lined up portal trajectories, but bored by the tedium of building endless struts without limitations folded into the puzzle design. As such, the hardest of Bridge Constructor Portal’s levels have a tedious cleverness to them. This approach gets a little tired during the final third of the game as each subsequent level only looks for more complex ways to criss-cross portals and paths, as opposed to challenging simple design. Puzzles focus more intently on trajectory through portals and getting angles just right. It was disappointing knowing that there were probably more refined solutions while looking at a monstrosity of struts and cross-bars designed to hold up a few small pieces of road. Is the roadway a little wobbly? Without budgetary or material restrictions, the answer was almost always more struts and more cables. Bridge Constructor lends its puzzle elements through simulating the physics of each thing I build, but those physics could often be overcome through flooding the screen with triangles. I had unlimited funds to place as many struts and roadway segments as I wanted, almost ensuring that any level could be brute forced by over-building. Budget is tracked, but is ultimately a meaningless number. Unlike previous Bridge Constructor games, Bridge Constructor Portal doesn’t require resource management in constructing solutions to each puzzle. Over time, additional elements are added that complicate the path to the goal, including the famed portals, companion cubes, and Portal’s deadly turrets. Puzzles start out easy enough, teaching the basics of bridge building and reinforcement. The basic idea is to construct physics-accurate bridges using cabling, struts, road segments, and predetermined anchor points in order to get testing vehicles from the beginning of the level to the end. Path to the CakeĪ side-scrolling, bridge-building puzzle game might be a departure from the first-person testing facilities that Portal fans are used to, but so are portals and bounce gel unfamiliar elements in the Bridge Constructor franchise. It never quite hits the same high notes that the writing in Portal and Portal 2 did, but hearing GLaDOS passively-aggressively insult my performance still brought a smile to my face. Bridge Constructor Portal’s humor centers on the dry sense that Aperture’s bottom line is more valued than human life. The Aperture testing chambers look like the sterile white environments that haunted Chell during her trials in the original games. GLaDOS is voiced by Ellen McLain, the same actress who portrayed her in the Portal series. Had I not known that Bridge Constructor was already a series, it would be easy to think that this was just a Portal spin-off. Marrying equal parts of each franchise, Bridge Constructor Portal sets the bar high as a crossover that feels less like fan service and more like an effective combination of each source property. The passive-aggressive intelligence made an appearance in LEGO Dimensions a few years ago, and now Bridge Constructor features an opportunity for fans to get a little bit more time in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center under her tutelage. Despite fans clamoring for more Portal, Valve seems particularly hesitant to milk the franchise.
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