REVIEW: Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead on Xbox One

Review by Jon Donnis

Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead is the latest in a line of Bridge Construction games, if you have played Bridge Constructor™ then you will instantly know the routine here. Build a bridge, get from point A to point B. Simple right?

Since this game has The Walking Dead branding, then you know things are about to get interesting, your job is to protect the human survivors, and in turn fight against hordes of un-dead Zo.... erm, un-dead "walkers". NEVER USE THE Z WORD! But as with the TV show you will also have to deal with hostile humans too.

So the game itself, it is all pretty simple to start with, build a bridge by placing struts and platforms, and either hide from the walkers as they go past, or kill them. The bridges you make will need to get more and more secure as you progress, so that vehicles can pass, as well as intricate designs so you can plan out more and more elaborate actions to survive the level, whether that be explosives that need to be set off, baits to lure walks into traps and so on. You also get some of the characters from the TV show appear as well, including Daryl, Michonne and Eugene.

The Good

The graphics are clean and easy to see and understand, you can zoom in, and once you understand everything, you will soon get the hang of things.

The Bad

The tutorial to start with is rubbish, simple as that, if you have never played a bridge construction game before and are coming to this as a new player, you will soon find yourself stuck with no idea how to go forward, this is mainly due to the differing controls as you play. For example, when constructing a bridge at no point does it tell you, you need to click twice to actually create the platform that people will walk across, so you will end up creating all of the struts, you will click play to start the movement and there is no bridge to walk on. That took me a while to figure out, and mainly after I downloaded a different bridge constructor game on my mobile phone, to see if I could see what I was doing wrong. Another problem is that controls when planning moves, switch between your left control stick (on Xbox) and then the D-Pad, so as you are trying to queue up commands, you will find yourself trying to do something and then cancelling it because you forgot to use the D-Pad. This is just terrible design and at no point in the tutorial do they tell you any of this specifically.

Overall

It took me way too long to figure out the controls and how to actually do the basics, once I did figure that out, then the game is fun, the levels are well designed, it is fun watching you destroy Walkers with traps set up, the graphics are great, and everything looks and plays fine, the problem here is a simple one, this is not a console game, this is a mobile phone game. You need to play this game with a touch screen.

For Xbox One, I score this game 5/10. It just does not work on a console.

However, play this on a Mobile, or a Tablet with touch screen and then the game scores 8/10.

Review by Jon Donnis

Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead will arrive on iOS, Android, PC, Nintendo Switch, XBox One and XBox Series X|S on November 19th!

Check out this short video of me completing the 3rd level in the game.