It’s all about getting to the other side in Poly Bridge 2. What’s there, you ask? I don’t know, but everybody wants to go there. Crossing a gap has never been this much on demand, and developer Dry Cactus knows it because this is their second game that has you deal with such a serious problem.
There isn’t much to Poly Bridge 2 in terms of a premise, really. You’re tasked with putting bridges together so any assortment of vehicles can get to the other side of a gap, sometimes even back around to the start. As levels progress, you’re given a variety of different variations that boil down to the same end goal, requiring you to make creative use of whatever set of parts you have at your disposal and hopefully under budget.
That means knowing how to read the challenge ahead of you and coming up with a viable plan in order to make things work. For as simple of a setup as Poly Bridge 2 has, its inner workings are anything but, allowing for a lot of room to play around with its physics, which are surprisingly complex and realistic enough to carry the game through and provide plenty of fun chaos when you mess up.
Putting bridges together is a matter of fitting it all in a grid-based plane where you can click and drag your mouse points in order to lay down pieces of road and the needed suspension and/or structure in order to keep it all from falling apart on its own or when a vehicle drives onto it. Or both!
You’ll fail a lot in this game. If this is your first time playing a Poly Bridge game, you’ll probably have as slow of a start as I did, because it seems that the devs assume you’ve played the first game before diving into this one due to how lacking in detail this version’s tutorial is in comparison to the first game. Thankfully, I picked up the original Poly Bridge during a Steam sale at some point and was able to go back and learn the more intricate details of how that game played, which is basically the same as the new version.
Poly Bridge 2 is by all accounts more of the same gameplay you might have seen in the first game with the inclusion of streaming integration tools that the former lacked. All the rest of the content is there, such as the different worlds and maps set in a number of environments and community features that you can use to share your creations and scores.
That’s not to say that the game itself is bad, but if you have already spent a lot of time playing Poly Bridge, it might be a little disappointing getting this sequel and seeing how closely it threads the same path, down to even having similarly designed or downright repeated levels. Both are excellent games that are sure to provide you with hours of entertainment most definitely, but switching from one to the other especially in the process of writing this review showed how it could be repetitive for returning players.
Both Poly Bridge games also look really similar. As with what came before it, Poly Bridge 2’s visuals are really colorful and charming, making use of few polygons — true to its name! — to provide a very light performance-wise game that’s able to run on just about any computer you can find that’s been built over the last handful of years. I just absolutely love how both games’ look comes together with a really relaxing soundtrack which is quite the opposite of the hectic nature of trying to get a bridge going just right in-game.
All in all, Poly Bridge 2 is an incredibly safe bet if you’re looking for a quick game to play for a few minutes, or one that you can really sink some time in order to get a level just right. The lack of a more detailed tutorial for new players is a little baffling, and it also might be a hard sell if you’re coming into it after playing the first, as it does little to nothing different from what that game did in just about every department.
