It might not seem like it, but I don’t actually hate every game that I play on Game Pass. Despite its bugs, I played all the way through Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was another pleasant surprise. I’ve even continued to play Metal Gear Solid 5 in my free time. Bridge Constructor Portal isn’t one of those games with gameplay that I can’t walk away from, though. In fact, its production values are so astonishingly cheap that its priority of appealing to the mobile market is immediately evident. This is a cheap phone game. I played an hour or so of Bridge Constructor Portal on the PC version of Game Pass, and I have no desire to play a second more of it or any other game in the series. It became obvious even in the short time that I played that the challenge will stem around its floaty physics rather than increasingly clever builds.

The embedded video covers three puzzles, and the third one took as long as the other two combined thanks to a combination of connection point ugliness and the physics not always playing ball. The goal is to build bridges that enable 1-5 vehicles to reach the ending, causing it to play like Lemmings with the planning-action dichotomy of American football.

There are portals, and there’s GLADoS, but all of that’s just a new coat of paint on an old game, which is mostly what I want to talk about. Valve’s IPs haven’t been doing so hot lately, have they? Half-Life finally rises from its grave, only for the resulting game to be a gimmicky VR adventure that motion sickness all but guarantees will lack the same kind of action the series is known for. Before that, it was Hunt Down The Freeman, a universally panned asset flip with Youtubers doing cringe-inducing voicework. Somehow, that one had Valve’s blessing.

The Portal series has been dead for a decent amount of time, as well, reaching its second entry and subsequently falling off the face of the map while the entire industry changed around it. I still remember the first time I played through the first and second Portal game, and Bridge Constructor Portal doesn’t evoke any of the same emotions. If anything, it makes me angry at how soulless and generic it is. Things that were once revolutionary shouldn’t be in hands that are incapable of recreating the same magic. Bridge Constructor Portal is to video games what Kurt Cobain would be if you had a time machine and saved him, only for his career to eventually lead to Dancing With the Stars; I suppose I’m grateful that Portal still exists in one form or another, but I also can’t help but suspect that it would be more meaningful if it was still dead.

Bridge Constructor Portal: Making special things generic first appeared on Killa Penguin