Poly Bridge is a really nice bridge building simulator in theory. While it brings a great number of puzzles with increasingly complex constraints and challenges, backed up by leaderboards and money limits to have you surpass yourself, it failed flat for me in the lack of help I was given once I just struggled endlessly on the same level. Going over-budget didn't help, not caring about the state of my bridge didn't help. I was just stuck and there was no real help in-game for me, which soured my experience and made me stop.
The core concept of the game is simple; You build bridges to get vehicles from one island to another. Sometimes there are checkpoints in the middle, sometimes boat go through your constructions, sometimes vehicles take more complex paths before netting you the win. While the early levels are well explained with tutorials here and there, you're left on your own after that. The initial tutorials are tailored to their levels and get you through them with explicit specificity, but I was left with the feeling that I didn't grasp the basics of bridge building. You have plenty of information about your bridges, how much weight they're taking, where are the spots that are weaker on your blueprint, but nothing about what you're doing wrong and how you could fix it.
To build your bridges, you use various materials, each with their maximal length, price and strength. There are ropes and movable parts in order to get drawbridges. Some levels give you a few special materials as well. Then, I suppose the best strategy would be to make triangles to strengthen your bridge and complete the challenges, but that technique failed me, especially when there was nothing to support the bridge's middle section. Having cars jump, climb steep roads and do anything more tricky than just crossing a small bridge became too much.
The game has some documentation and I had to refer to it in order to get my draw-bridge in a semi working state, but that's all I've found. No helpful advice about specific levels, about how one could go to solving them. I guess I could've went online to get answers, but that didn't seem like fun to me. I managed to get a few levels in while always being over-budget, but then the game starting to hit me with claims that I was 'out of money'. What's the point of allowing to be over budget if there is a maximum limit? Shouldn't that limit be displayed? Hitting that wall completely turned me off from the game, and I stopped there.
