![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. However, there did seem to be a few quirks that cropped up now and again. ![]() 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. The controls in Bridge Constructor Portal work well enough considering they’re on an Xbox One controller. 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 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. 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. Luckily, creating a bridge is a snap, at least when it comes to the construction part rather than the planning. ![]() 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. 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. 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. The goal of each level in Bridge Constructor Portal is to create a bridge capable of getting a forklift to a chamber’s exit. 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. 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. 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. As it turns out, portals are a wonderful fit for a bridge building game.īridge 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. 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. 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.
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