Bridge Strike

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in Action Games Bundle 5 in 1, along with Event Horizon, Event Horizon: Space Defense, Mech Rage, and Genetic Disaster.)

Bridge Strike is a Shmup released on Nintendo Switch in 2020, where players pilot a fighter jet looking to prevent an invasion into your unnamed country by the armed forces of another unnamed country. Look, the localization in this one is pretty bad, they’re clearly not hoping the story is going to sell you on this one.

The presentation here is pretty decent, with colorful, slightly-cartoony 2D pixel art visuals that seem reminiscent of the classic Advance Wars games, with some nice weather effects here and there. Nothing impressive, but at least it’s visually-interesting. This is joined by barely-audible music and some simple explosion sound effects.

For the gameplay, Bridge Strike is a very unusual Shmup, because there are hardly any enemies, or at least not what you would consider an enemy in the traditional way you look at Shmup games. Rather, what you’ll mostly encounter are obstacles, slow-moving or stationary enemy planes and ships that will damage you if you collide with them, but otherwise take no notice of you and mostly don’t fire at you.

To be fair, there are sections when tiny turrets will fire missiles at you, but these only fire horizontally, and they’re mostly just a danger because they’re so small you may not see them.

It’s just as well that the enemies are pathetic and largely toothless, because your weaponry is also pretty pathetic by genre standards, with an extremely slow fire rate for a single missile going straight ahead. You’ll use this weapon to clear out enemy vessels in your way, as well at taking out the titular bridges that bar your path forward.

Beyond the occasional missile, the biggest risks you’ll encounter are running out of gas, and splits in the river you’re traveling on where one path is instant death. For the former, you have a gas gauge constantly ticking down, and you can refill this gas by moving over grey aircraft carrier ships, something the game fails to convey to the player. These ships are so frequent it shouldn’t matter if you miss one or accidentally shoot one down, there will be another one soon enough.

Given that the only challenge present here comes from threats so small that they’re hard to see and misleading pathing that indicates an area is safe when it isn’t, Bridge Strike is an exceptionally dull Shmup, and I cannot possibly recommend it. Even a “Baby’s first Shmup” would require more action than this, and shouldn’t kill the player due to poorly conveying visual information. Oh, and the $7 price tag is an outright insult. Skip this one.

tl;dr – Bridge Strike is a Shmup where enemies rarely attack you, and the only challenges you’ll face are from the game failing to visually convey information to the player. This is a miserably dull game, and I cannot recommend it.

Grade: D-

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