Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead

Review

Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead is a fun indie game with a twist, set in a parallel universe to The Walking Dead. It tickled me to the bone thinking how will this play out in the world of The Walking Dead.

Well, you’ll build bridges while hordes of dead are coming for you!!! Unpractical and stupid, but the game’s pretty good and a good brain tickler as well.

Plot: The world came to an abrupt holt, something wasn’t right. People started getting sick. Falling sick so fast that they didn’t even have time to realize what was going on. People started dying at an unprecedented rate.

The media dismissed it and claimed that it was all a lie. But soon they were gone and it all came down crashing.

Suddenly the dead started to rise. Panic soon followed, the society pushed into disarray and anarchy.

The dead attacked without fear or remorse. Many fell; the few who did survive the initial wave started regrouping in order to survive.

Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead lets you experience a tactical side of the survival by building bridges to escape from and to kill the walking dead.

Gameplay: The base gameplay is simple and comes with a lot of pieces that need to be put into the right spot and put into motion.

The theme of the game is to construct time and situation-appropriate bridges, ramps, walkways, and contraptions, with the main goal being to ensure the survivors walk away untouched and kill the walking dead at the same time.

The game progresses through chapters and each chapter consists of multiple stages. At the beginning of every stage, you will be given a purpose and budget allocation of materials to construct bridges.

In the beginning, it seems there will be no shortage of materials to construct, but things soon become a lot more complex and technical. Therefore, keeping material usage to a minimum is necessary.

As you start the stage and understand your purpose for that stage, you will need to plan out how to put your bridge together. As you figure things out you can simply left-click and drag one of multiple starting points to construct your bridge.

As you’re working on it, a good thing to always keep in mind is that early wooden bridges need upper or lower support with wooden beams to support the structure.

And as you progress further, you will get to use and manage other materials, such as steel cables and such to construct and manage your bridges.

As you get more materials and larger construction areas, things get more complicated; further planning is required, and on top of that, you will need to adjust to the added complexity of dealing with the dead on each different stage with different scenarios and with different methods.

Some will let you crush the dead under containers and others might allow you to drop the whole bridge. Some will even let you use scenario-related items.

Whatever you do, the survivors need to be safe.

There are three main aspects of the gameplay –

• Construction: By toggling the construction buttons, you will be allowed to use all the allocated materials for each stage and construct the necessary structures.
• Command: By toggling, you will be able to interact with multiple terminals, which in turn convert into commands for the selected survivors. There maybe one or multiple survivors in each stage that you must interact with and each needs to perform various tasks to complete each stage; by using the command feature you can enable them to do so.
• Execute: By hitting the execute button you will be able to let your survivors go and perform their intended commands. Things might go wrong as you make poor decisions, and for that reason the execute toggle also comes with a pause and rewind button, which allows you to pause your survivor's move or just rewind it all to gather.

The gameplay also comes with camera movement, zoom in and out, cancel construction, undo, redo, and most importantly, material change keys, (which are not changeable).

Puzzles: Not too complicated, but as you progress this gets a bit heated; since there are no time limits, you can take your time and figure things out with ease. The puzzles were a good balance of simple yet tricky; some took me no time at all and some several minutes (exact numbers of which I would hate to admit).

A negative that I must mention that you will soon encounter is the dialogue and the guide. The gameplay is simple, and the puzzles are simple enough, and so should be the guide and dialogues between survivors. But they just take way too long to explain things and they explain them in a complicated manner.

World design: Cartoonish art style world design which you wouldn’t expect from such the theme, but it looks and feels good.

The world is colorful yet dulled out to give it a post-apocalyptic feel, combined with empty streets, burning buildings, damaged and well-worn structures, etc. 

Sound effects and music: A well put-together assortment of sound effects and background ambient noises. Doesn’t really portray a post-apocalyptic world but does give a feeling of emptiness and uncomfortable chills.

Background music was a pretty good implementation that fits the game's narrative just fine and created a good immersive experience.

Considering all aspects of the game Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead turned out to be a good one, after such titles as Bridge constructor: Portal from the devs at Clockstone.

It’s fun and casual and puts out a good assortment of puzzles with interesting headscratchers.  Combined with its appropriately chilling background music selections, it was an enjoyable experience.

Review written by BiteMexD for Zeepond.com!