Bridge Constructor Portal

I love Valve and Half-Life, and Portal was so fun when it came out. I love puzzles, and now I can have a Portal-themed game on my phone and/or iPad! I prefer to use on my phone so I can play on the go. All the humour of GLaDOS is there, this time with an Aperture employee. Keep in mind this is a bridge-building game, and not the same type of puzzles as in the original first-person games, but they are just as exciting, albeit in a different way. You have to ensure that you use clever use of physics and structural engineering to make sure your fellow employees don't fall in the green goo. Spoiler alert: it melts them! :'( I don't usually write reviews because I can be lazy but I want to get the word out so the developers can update content and add more levels over time. It's a lot of fun and I find myself playing more and more. Thanks for a really cool game! - Max M.

Usually if I pay for an app I don’t expect it to have adds. Way to ruin a great game. Above was my first review. However the developers have responded and fixed the issue. So now I can talk about how good this game is. First of all it is not Portal. It’s just a bridge game with a Portal theme. This is definitely not a complaint. I love this new twist of a physics based bridge game. The silly comments from everyone’s favorite AI GLaDOS are delightfully funny and the puzzles very clever. If I have any complaints it’s the issue with cloud syncing. I started on my phone and when I switched to my iPad the game didn’t sync over so I went back to my phone only to find that the cloud sync reset that game. Usually this would just be annoying but you can’t skip the tutorial so I ended up giving up and coming back a day later. The rest of this game is so nice that I can look over that. There is a simple fix however. Other games that utilize this cloud sync will prompt you before resetting your game. The prompt will say something like “newer save found would you like to use the current save of the cloud save”. So really once they fix that I can’t really find anything wrong with the game. I haven’t gotten to the end yet but I’m moving through the levels and I’ve only pulled Googled a solution once. Level 53 was a doozy.

These comments are not meant to contradict the many people who like this game — and I am one of those players — but as someone who played Portal 1 and 2 (and the player-designed maps) multiple times, I have to point out to the developers that part of the joy and pain of Portal is knowing you only have two portals at one time, *and* you have to figure out where to put them to do the task at hand. This game is focused on two things: (1) determine the logic of getting the vehicle from entrance to exit, and (2) figure out how to make the needed structures with the available attachment points. For the first 30 levels I chalked up the “insanely challenging” comments to people unfamiliar with Portal, but I now understand that the game designers have devised some truly fiendish puzzles. I thought I would finish the entire game in two days, but progress has slowed dramatically ... Another thing for the developers: for color blind people like me, the multi-portal levels can be problematic. Level 57 is making me weep. How about the ability in Build mode to touch a portal and have the corresponding portal light up or pointed to with an arrow, or something? The logic problems are challenging enough. Not knowing where a portal leads is a show stopper.

This game is... meh. The portal themes are great and GLaDOS’ commentary is fun, but i found that the game started out fun, but then became tedious and headache inducing with the later levels. After level thirty I stopped having fun, the game became a chore to play and I never left it feeling good. The bridge mechanics are overly precise, moving one node to the left will cause everything to fall apart and although this level of precision sounds great, it can be really irritating. I love puzzle games, especially portal 1 and 2, but this game was kind of disappointing. Also I got really annoyed with the loading times, I’ve played fully 3D games on ios that have shorter load times than this and it spends way too much time trying to sync to the internet. Not to mention when it just decides to crash for no reason, but these weren’t HUGE issues, but they didn’t make my experience with the game anymore enjoyable. The games decent if you have a head for engineering and like hard games, but I personally didn’t enjoy it and professionally didn’t find it all that engaging.

So I originally installed this app on my iPhone and after playing a few levels I realize this would play much better on my iPad. So I went to the App Store and downloaded installed the game on my iPad. But when I went to play, it had no sound. I thought it was originally a problem with my iPad or I had the volume down or mute. But when I went back to play the game on my iPhone, it no longer had sound! I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling this game on both devices and it didn't resolve the audio problem for either. The link to the app support within the App Store does not work. All you get is a website that says “this space intentionally left empty”. So I went to the vendors website and sent a support email request over a week ago with no response yet! Not a huge problem for me as I normally play games with the sound off because it can get annoying, but the lack of response to my reported issue bothers me and should be taken into consideration if you plan to purchase.