Bridge the Gap

Thanks to Johnny Depp and Somalia, pirates are the criminal du jour right now (any day now we can expect ninjas to sneak back into the picture).

The drinking, swashbuckling, and mayhem are excellent fodder for gaming. Bridge the Gap: A Pirate’s Life for Me focusses on the strategy elements, but it ends up suffering from dry rot in the gaming department.

The head pirate and his sea-footed crew have to get from island to island. Unfortunately, there are massive gaps along the way.

You simply drop either height-helping barrels or platforming bamboo sticks in the right places to get the pirates from shore to shore safely. Collect the three gold coins in the round to unlock new areas.

And, like the lemmings they are, once the pirates start walking, it’s up to you to watch their step. Positioning a barrel perfectly mid-way between a stick will create balance, while a stick dropped closely on top of another stick may hold the weight of the men. You also have to deal with enemies occasionally.

The controls are a crude but usable set of arrows and icons. It would have been easier to flick or slide the screen - one of the main points of having a touchscreen in the first place -but the on-screen buttons work fine.

Bridge the Gap was made with GameSalad, the popular interface that allows quick game creation. Though there are some solid titles that use it, this isn’t one of them.

Firstly, it has some rough animation. It looks like the characters are skipping every other frame.

Secondly, the game is way too slow. Puzzle games can have great, methodical pacing, but Bridge the Gap becomes boring within the first few levels.