Last week I embraced the 5Headness and tried Poly Bridge for the first time, second game came out recently and devs were nice to hook me up with a key. What made me actually get interested in the game was Twitch integration, which got me curious when I first saw it on Steam, but then I saw it on Lirik’s stream and how exactly it works and was sold instantly, I think that is something many games should adapt in similar fashion.
So review is more from streamer’s perspective, since all the integration fun will be missing if you are just playing solo, even though you can also just go to the stream of the game and pretty much play through the streamer for free if they have integration on, but I think it should still be a very good solo game for the price.
Let’s start with basic information about the game to understand it better – goal is to build a bridge, or something that will help you get object from one side to another, sometimes also back, sometimes with collecting checkpoints on the way, sometimes with some limitations on available tools and sometimes multiple objects with different “stats” and “goals”. You have a whole bunch of tools that allow you to achieve it, including hydraulics and other complicated tech that you can use in your projects. Very interesting and fun way to teach you some physics and engineering basics, because everything is made quite simplistic, smooth, easy and fast, something like this should be in schools imo, would be totally more productive way to teach kids and not only kids tbh. Game runs super fast and smooth, graphics look nice, music is super chill and fits the gameplay perfectly, not getting repetitive or annoying at all, controls and interface are pretty user friendly, even though of course some things are a bit 5Head, but that’s the nature of the game, amount of content is pretty big too, challenge mode provides some extra replayability and game has mod support and workshop levels too.
So how does Twitch fit into this? It is made through the extension that streamers can put below the stream in panels where you usually find donation buttons, rules, FAQs etc. Not the regular integration when chat just spams some commands, right? Through that extension viewers basically get to build whatever level streamer is playing on their own, getting full game’s building functionality completely for free and then submitting their levels which streamer in turn can just load with one button in their game and “run” on stream so you can see your project’s results live. And of course it is all depending on community, size of the stream etc, but I personally had a blast with my stream, we did around 3 sessions and almost every time I was losing sense of time and streams were getting long. Integration in this game gives you a whole new level and method of interaction with your viewers, fun and engaging way too, was one of the best experiences just trying to build my version and then going through chat’s projects that piled up during that time and trying to fix them all together after to make it work and to make some interesting solutions that probably aren’t optimal, but fun to make and see them work. Some people after playing the game like this went and bought them for themselves to play more when I was done streaming it, so pretty sure despite the concept that allows you to kinda play it for free it’s still good for the game from commercial perspective. Streamers also benefit from the concept since some people just join streams to play it for free and to show their ideas to different chats to impress them, so I’d say win win for everyone involved with this game. Hope to see more games with similar integration method and concept, hopefully with similar well made extensions that work great.