If you found yourself with a lot of time on your hands this holiday, or maybe even with a fancy gift card to use, Bridge Constructor Portal is my recommendation on what to get this season. Presented by Clockstone, enter the Aperture Science Enrichment Center and get sciency! Prepare to have a puzzling good time and get your fellow coworkers through the portals.
For fans of the original game Portal, this game may come as a bit of a surprise. This is because Bridge Constructor Portal is combined with the original Bridge Constructor game. So it’s the best of both worlds really. In this game, you must secure a job in the Aperture science test lab and build bridges with fancy Portal equipment so that your co-workers (called Bendies) can get across, or through rather.
Now all of that sounds fairly simple, and there is a pretty quirky tutorial to guide you through the first steps by GLaDOS, but there is more. You must build roads, play with physics and test run all of your creations or else your Bendie friends will fall to their doom in to a pit of acid, in to a laser field and in to turrets. Each level has a goal number of Bendies that have to get through in order to win and there are 60 test chambers to win. As an added bonus, this game also has 16 achievements too for all of the completionist players.
Upon getting in to the game, I notice right away that the game was very crisp and clean and runs well too. Luckily, this held my attention because no one wants a game that isn’t aesthetically pleasing. Running through the tutorial as well is simple but the game itself can be time consuming. I would have liked to see function where time could be sped up but overall the feature wouldn’t bother me if it was never added.
One of the best parts of the game is the humor, a staple of the Portal series. This is evident from the beginning of the game. Answer one little question wrong and you might have a quick end to your adventure. While it might be tempting to skip through some of GLaDOS prompts, don’t. There are some hilarious instructions and call backs to the earlier games.
There’s something fun about jumping through portals and playing with the other fun equipment the game has to offer but it does take some time to mess with the physics of the game. Overall, I would definitely recommend this game for its quirky and funny characters and the puzzles the game provides. The puzzles make you think but they do it in a fun way.
Bridge Constructor Portal is available now on Xbox, PS4, and PC