14 DAY TRIAL // Poly Bridge initially seems far too shallow to appeal to PC gamers, the kind of experience that has actually been designed to be offered on mobile devices and ended up accidentally on other platforms, but the game soon had me clapping in delight when my vehicles got across and close to punching my desk when a stress point failed.
The core idea of the title developed by Dry Cactus is simple: gamers get a budged and some materials to choose from and they have to build a bridge to the specifications of the title, making sure that the shown vehicles move from one bank of a river to the other safely.
Players will initially build their structure, able to choose between materials, delete badly designed sections, and zoom in to see how a change will affect their creation.
Once that's done, a simulation is run that shows the results, which depend on the type of vehicle that crosses the bridge and other potential special conditions.
Poly Bridge has a very deep physics simulation engine that manages to generate some spectacular results both in success and in failure, and the game makes it easy to quickly make a few small touches and then attempt to get the cars across once more.
The title starts off with simple challenges and designs, asking the player to simply distribute weight between contact points and to use the various terrain features to make their bridge sturdier.
The first difficulty spike in Poly Bridge appears early on, when jumping is introduced, and the player needs to evaluate distances and jump ranges even if there's no way to see them in the game without running a simulation.
Jumps feel a little unfair, but otherwise Poly Bridge is a game that wants to make sure that players always have the information they need, using a clear graph design to show them how they can connect various elements of their structures.
Weight distribution seems easy to judge initially, but as the development team introduces new and weirder scenarios, it becomes very hard to create fully supported structures, and there were many levels where my structures looked very frail but managed to get the job done.
Poly Bridge creates an enjoyable loop of thinking, implementation, failure, evaluation and then more thinking, which can sometimes frustrate but most of the time encourages players to find out new ways to add support to their bridges without going over budget.
The tutorial is also informative and quickly moves the player through the core mechanics, without forcing them to follow one way of solving the various challenges.
A solid experience with some interesting twists
When it comes to graphics, Poly Bridge manages to blend cuteness and depth, with a nice cartoonish vibe for the environments and the bridge itself, and with an interface that allows gamers to understand where their designs fail and how they can improve future projects.
The variable speed option does something similar.
The sound design is relatively limited and boring but manages to reflect the relatively bland nature of the game and to encourage careful thinking about the best way to create bridges.
Poly Bridge is at the moment in the middle of an Early Access period, but the title feels pretty much feature complete.
The development team at Dry Cactus needs to work a little bit more on the difficulty, and the game could also use some more innovative challenges at some point, but other than that, the new title will certainly find a solid audience once the 1.0 version is out, even if it does not have the appeal of the classic World of Goo, from which it takes some core ideas.
Take a look at some gameplay footage taken from Poly Bridge:
