Game Reviews

Flow Free: Bridges

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Flow Free: Bridges

The follow-up to a hugely successful, chart-topping game that delivers just the bare minimum of new ideas for fear of alienating fans?

Nope, it's not Call of Duty: Black Ops - Declassified. It's Flow Free: Bridges, the sequel to the insanely popular puzzler, Flow Free, from Big Duck Games.

And you know what? Despite playing it safe, Bridges is pretty great.

Familiar

In Flow Free: Bridges it's your job to connect matching coloured nodes with pipes without overlapping any of the connections. Sporting almost identical visuals and audio to its predecessor, this looks almost like a clone.

The twist comes with the addition of the titular bridges. These allow two pipes to intersect at one single predetermined point on the board. It's a neat trick, and one that adds just enough extra complexity and depth to justify a new game.

Bridges aren't optional extras or a way to alleviate the challenge of the game's intricately designed puzzles - they're baked into every one of the single-solution levels.

While the game features a customisable Time Trial mode, you'll spend most of your time in Free Play, where you can tackle a total of 300 levels of increasing board size and complexity.

Once it gets its claws into you, Flow Free: Bridges offers hours of entertainment. Not bad for 69p.

Satisfying

Despite the familiarity of the design, Flow Free: Bridges is a wonderfully entertaining title.

Perhaps it's the tactility of it - the way you can swoosh your finger around the board to draw a pipe. Or perhaps it's the way each connection is greeted with a satisfying audio "plopip!"

Or perhaps it's the triumphant feeling of completing even the easiest of levels, and of completing the mental leap required to fill the boards correctly.

Reach the later stages of the game and perfect a 9x9 square board and you'll feel like a genius - especially if you avoid using the game's in-app purchase hints.

Despite all this, however, the fact remains that Big Duck Games has been incredibly conservative, adding just one new element to an experience that could have been built upon further.

In the end, Flow Free: Bridges is a great little game that could, and perhaps should, have been much greater.

Flow Free: Bridges

A thoroughly entertaining and wonderfully crafted puzzle game, Flow Free: Bridges is only held back by its conservatism
Score
Lee Bradley
Lee Bradley
A freelancer for just about anyone that will have him, Lee was raised in gloomy arcades up and down the country. Thanks to this he's rather good at Gauntlet, OutRun and fashioning fake pound coins from pennies and chewing gum. These skills have proved to be utterly useless in later life.