Bridge-IT, Amsoft, CPC 464

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The official story for this game is as follows:

“You live in a town where every house is surrounded by water. This makes visiting friends difficult until some bright spark invents bridges.”

Now this actually raises far more interesting questions than the actual game itself.

When they say houses do they mean boats? Why didn’t they just link them all together with a single dock? Surely bridges are an obvious invention when surrounded by water?

Anyway, weird story aside, Bridge-IT is awful. I could end this review here but I feel I need to make sure no one ever plays this game and I can’t afford to buy up all the copies (have you seen retro prices!).

You control the bridges (all four of them) by using a different direction on the joystick (or keyboard, not that it matters, you’ll still fail) to close them. That allows someone to cross them. Thrilling, I know!

At first it’s just one man running from one house to another (I used to make up a story that they were running from an angry husband who has returned from a hard day’s boating to find his wife in bed with another man; it didn’t make the game any better but I felt less bad about all the people dying) but then you get more and more people and so you have to work out the timings of closing the bridges because they only stay closed for a short time.

For some reason the bridges are open as default, which seems a bizarre choice given the lack of boats, and the people are either drunk or blind and can’t actually see the state of bridges and so simply run, trusting you to close the bridge in time.

The graphics, as I am sure you can see, were awful even for an Amsoft game. In fact, it’s taken me 40 years to realise there are boats—boats with very, very long oars.

I’m sure some people enjoy it, the sort of people who have grown up to become serial killers or estate agents. I hated it, like really hated it.

I only played it because I was annoyed that I could never get very far in the game and I hated myself because of it.