27 March 2012

Skip It

I hate reviews that end with, "Fans of the genre should check it out, but everyone else blah, blah, blah." And yet, here we are, as OnLive week continues:

For the sake of focus, I tried to limit how many comparisons I made to other games in my critique, but Bridge It's "build something, test it, adjust" approach is not inherently bad, It's actually quite similar to one of my favourite series ever, The Incredible Machine. I think I would need to play more Bridge It to fully articulate why it does and doesn't work, but the biggest problem I found in my time was one of abstraction. The pieces offered in The Incredible Machine are so exaggerated that anyone can predict their functionality at a glance. The differences - visually, functionally - between a tennis ball and a bowling ball are profoundly apparent.

Maybe there's an Incredible Machine/World of Goo hybrid hiding within Bridge It for those who spend more than a few minutes playing, but I'm not impressed enough with what I've seen so far to look for it.