Bridge Constructor Portal (Xbox One)
The two games that make up Valve’s Portal series united some interesting puzzles about spatial awareness with some expertly written comedic villains, but as Valve drifted more and more away from producing video games, it seemed like we wouldn’t be paying another visit to the series any time soon. However, thanks to an increasing openness with their intellectual properties, we did finally get a return trip to the world of Portal but in a most unexpected yet still quite appropriate form. As it turns out, portals are a wonderful fit for a bridge building game.
Bridge Constructor Portal involves the player taking on the role of a new employee at Aperture Science, a company so devoted to the pursuit of science that it it will happily and openly jeopardize the safety of its researchers and even their families if it could provide some valuable research data. This ideology isn’t really kept secret, but it is obscured by the corporate speak and deceptive tone of the notifications and warnings given to employees about their deliberately unsafe work environment, the robotic AI GLaDOS overseeing the player’s work to both provide them useful info for the experiments that will be conducted while nailing in that they are expendable in the pursuit of science. Much of this carries over from the first two Portal games tone-wise and perhaps the game does lean into it a bit too much to try and remain faithful to it, but it doesn’t fulfill the same narrative purpose considering you remain within the Aperture Science framework for the whole game rather than resisting the injustices of the corporate environment. The Portal series is mostly here to provide a recognizable coat of paint to the affair while bringing over elements from Valve’s puzzle game series to make the bridge building more interesting.
The goal of each level in Bridge Constructor Portal is to create a bridge capable of getting a forklift to a chamber’s exit. So long as it gets there in-tact, it doesn’t matter if it loses its riders or performs some dangerous flips or jumps, the level will be considered a success. This doesn’t mean the forklifts are invincible though, as there are plenty of things in the chambers like lasers and acid that can destroy them, and since they always try to drive forward, they might end up stuck if the bridges don’t give them the room to build up speed or make them face the wrong direction. Each chamber is designed to be difficult to navigate for the forklift, the player needing to build bridges that will let it overcome geometry and missing floors to get to its destination, the chambers gradually getting more and more complicated as you’ll soon need to build gargantuan, complex structures to help it weave around the many obstacles to the exit. Luckily, creating a bridge is a snap, at least when it comes to the construction part rather than the planning. Every level has certain anchor points in the environment you build off of, stretching out metal struts and connecting them at junction points to build your bridges. The game makes sure to teach you some basic bridge constructing methods, as a bridge that isn’t properly laid out will not be able to support the weight of the forklift or perhaps even itself. Most of your building work will involve the metal struts and junctions, but you can also create cables that have a much greater possible length than the struts, allowing for the player to experiment with both suspension bridge and truss bridge designs.
The controls in Bridge Constructor Portal work well enough considering they’re on an Xbox One controller. For most of the experience you can expect to be able to place down junctions and stretch out your struts and cables as you desire, zooming into the chamber more from your omniscient side view to make your adjustments more precise. However, there did seem to be a few quirks that cropped up now and again. The most prevalent one had to be when attempting to connect parts at their junction points, there is usually a snapping mechanic to make it easy to build quickly, but whether you’re taking your time or speeding through, it seems like sometimes the snapping mechanic stutters, leading you to build a piece that ends a millimeter right before the junction you were trying to connect it to. It’s just a quick adjustment to fix, and since you can run a test of your current layout in a few different ways, there’s no real worry about building the bridge wrong. You can test its physics alone just to see if its sturdy enough to stand, or you can run out the forklift and watch if your bridge is built for the task. There is no penalty if the forklift doesn’t make it or explodes, you just need to go back and keep working, and there’s no penalty for how many materials you use either. It tells you the supposed price of construction, but it seems to be a pointless metric, the more important way of testing yourself coming in completing the chamber. Once you’ve got one forklift to reach the end though, you can then see how your bridge handles a convoy of them, the amount varying but plenty of them popping out in rapid succession to really test the durability of your design. While you can scrape by with a self-destructing bridge for the goal of getting a single forklift across, the convoy encourages more professional and lasting designs.
Struts and cables are your only real tools in Bridge Constructor Portal, but they do get the job done. Later chambers will certainly require you to get very creative with their use, huge webs of metal and wire being built just to help a forklift cross the increasingly complex designs, but you only ever need these two building materials for it, so its more about understanding the physics of your construction than figuring out what to use. It is a shame that the game doesn’t embrace the Portal elements it brings over construction wise, but the elements of Valve’s series do appear as part of the test chambers. Portals will already exist in the stage, forklifts able to enter one of them and pop out of the matching portal, and it certainly seems like this could have been a building tool given to the player and limited appropriately to keep things difficult. However, it does still encourage some creative design, as you’ll often have to build multiple bridges to pass the trucks through portals or even help them build up momentum so they can be launched out elsewhere in the level. To help with this deliberate recklessness, there are two types of gel that appear, one that is bouncy when touched and one that will speed up the vehicles. Again, it would be interesting to place them, but they also encourage you to build bridges that aren’t focused just on closing gaps, but also on throwing trucks into the gel-covered surfaces to get them bounding around or zipping speedily past trouble. With buttons the trucks need to press on the way, bouncing energy pellets the player will need to guide with their built bridges, and turrets that will open fire if they spot the drivers, Portal’s contributions to the game do make it a much more interesting bridge building game than its basic design would have otherwise been, but it does front load much of these hazards and mechanics, meaning the later puzzles are more about complex arrangements of them rather than continuously introducing new and exciting challenges.
The game packs in sixty unique bridge-building challenges, but it does not appear to have the level builder the PC version received at the moment. The extra variety that could be gained from such a feature would be welcome, as that’s the main thing holding this back from being more enjoyable. A lot of the focus is on micromanaging the structural integrity of your bridge since your materials are limited and you don’t have access to the creative solutions that being able to place the portals would provide. Even just a few more materials on offer could make it more involved, but probably what it would need most is some way to quickly test your level. After a small bit of fine-tuning, you must wait for the forklift to drive at its regular pace through the stage, and in longer levels, this can be quite the wait only to see your final struts weren’t spaced properly and you need to run the test again. Just having a quicker testing method would make fine-tuning the bridge a more enjoyable prospect, the game testing your knack for bridge architecture well but not really embracing the video game side of things as strongly as it should.
THE VERDICT: Bridge Constructor Portal borrows the interesting elements of the Portal series to make a bridge building game that has a distinct visual style and tone as well as some interesting obstacles in the form of the portals and turrets that encourage more diverse and elaborate bridge designs. The Portal license adds plenty to the game to make the construction challenging, but the game does limit your range of tools to engage with it. They’re up to the task despite some control hiccups and the game spilling out most of its unique ideas early on, so even though there is room to imagine what more Bridge Constructor Portal could do, it still manages to take the construction work behind building bridges and make it a mentally stimulating challenge of balancing sci-fi elements with the basics of physics and construction design.
And so, I give Bridge Constructor Portal for Xbox One…
A GOOD rating. Bridge building games are typically tests of the player’s understanding of structural integrity, and Bridge Constructor Portal is no different. Most of the challenges are based around you making sure you’ve got a reasonably sturdy structure for the forklifts to drive across as they go through crazy fictional challenges like teleporting portals and gels that bounce you around like a rubber ball. Besides the small issues with connecting struts and how variety is replaced with complexity focused around micromanagement, Bridge Constructor Portal isn’t a game that makes mistakes so much as it is one that encourages you to imagine what more could have been done. The way you build is simple and makes solving the level puzzles a matter of proper execution, but it could have been more interesting to have the diverse toolkit that was used to design levels also on hand to build bridges. What we have now is still an enjoyable puzzle game enhanced by the quirky additions to grounded physics challenges, but it should have been more willing to embrace the unrealistic to make it stand out more and keep the variety coming in the late game.
Bridge Constructor Portal is certainly a creative direction for the Bridge Constructor series and one made more enjoyable for its embrace of the weird and wacky, so it can provide a pretty good challenge for someone looking to test their architectural understandings in a way that won’t boil down to just the tried and true methods that would work in real life. After all, no real bridge builder has had to deal with things like absorbing the momentum of a forklift with a hanging suspension bridge after its been launched through a teleportation portal by some orange goo.