We’re still waiting for the big fish of the physics puzzler world to become available for the iPhone. To tide you over until its release, Bridge Odyssey is another cheap pick up and play title in the style of that highly acclaimed title, World of Goo. This gameloft produced title more closely resembles Tiki Towers, an entertaining puzzler that for its time had some excellent gameplay and was almost sure to cheer you up.

There isn’t a lot that is new here aside from occasionally interacting with the environment to make the level more accessible. Controlling the game presents no problems, you’ll simply tap on the screen to attach pieces of bamboo to small circular nodes, and drag vines to latch onto your bridges to give them greater strength. For a quick scan of the screen, you can pinch in and out to zoom, and you can switch at any time between the play mode and the build mode, whether your bridge is complete or not.

A nice touch is that each character has its own physical attributes and so will affect the bridge differently. Factoring these into the equation, you will easily be able to figure out how many of the levels fit together and it’s only at the last island when things get tricky. It’s nonetheless entertaining watching your troop of animal friends traversing your ramshackle creations and praying that they don’t collapse.

Completing a level is a matter of simply getting your herd across towards the other side. You’ll be awarded with a different statuette depending on how well you did—if you used less bamboo than required or collected all the golden eggs suspended in the air on each stage you will be rewarded for that. It is fairly easy to meet all these requirements as the game will let you know if you’re using too much bamboo—make sure that the indicator is green before hitting play.

Leading on from there, each island has its own distinct theme. Starting on the beach, you’ll then navigate through forest, icy tundra and barren desert complete with quicksand traps in the quest to reach each golden idol at the end of the level. Each environment has been carefully drawn in a wonderful 2.5D approach complete with some great lighting and shadow effects. The stark contrast between the rich backgrounds and the plain black and white characters actually lends the game its own style, rather than going with something predictable. It’s not all good though—the music is just a little trite. There’s also a bug whilst playing your own music, the game will crash the iPod application upon exit via the home button.

Like all gameloft games, Bridge Odyssey excels in presentation and design but merely copies a successful formula. Sure, there’s a couple of new elements here but overall it’s no different to its luminaries that have been out for quite some time. If that’s fine with you, we’d say that it is a good physics puzzler that is a fun introduction to this fantastic genre.

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Why not try...

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  Tiki Towers

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  Moonlights

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  Build 'n Bash

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  Paper Bridge