Following closely on the heels of the HL2 Ep2 Review is the Portal review. Since this comes packaged with orange box, it’s a no brainer i’d be reviewing it here.

Lets get picky!

Actually This won’t be a huge indepth review becuase portal is well.. not a large or deep in scope game. That really is my only gripe about it! It’s fairly short.

The game begins with you in a small room with glass windows, a test subject. Remeniscent of THX-1138. All you have is an alarm clock and some kind of sleeping pod and then a female digital, yet harmonicly pleasent, voice comes over the intercomm. It begins to instruct you on what to do. And it keeps instructing you. That is essentially the game. There is no real fast paced action, no guys to shoot and kill, no guns to shoot at all actually. Except for the small portal unit you will get.

This is a curious little device. It lets you create a hole in a wall that leads you out another hole somewhere else. To start you can only create Hole A, and not Hole B, hole B is designated by something else and cannot be moved. After you work your way through a few puzzles you pick up the portal device that makes B holes. At that point the game really opens up and challanges your mind and reflexes for that matter.

Essentially the game will have you moving boxes around and putting them on switches to open doors or hold the power on that goes to some device, the boxes often times cant be lifted high enough to be put where they need to, so you need to use the portal device. You also will use portals to redirect the floating ‘power balls’ and to somethings propel yourself to high up area’s, which is where it really gets fun.

The first time I fell into a portal and out the other side, from a high drop, it really showed how it can spit you out at fast speeds, and helps you understand and appreciate inertia. I wont try to spoil too much via this review, but this is realy more of a first person puzzle game, but you really feel you have alot of freedom being able to create doorways to wherever you want. There is the occasional exception, they will put up tiles where you cannot create the portals, requiring you to think outside the box a little bit, but overal, I was never stuck on a single puzzle for longer than 10 minutes. Everything seemed to breeze by fine!

As a game in and of itself, its hard to review this for a dollar amount. Its really a short experience, but it does have a high satisfactory level associated with, and high fun factor. No real frustration at all, once you figure out how a puzzle is solved, you just need to execute, and generally I was able too on my first try.

Overall the game was pretty fun. In the complete package It’s easy to rate the game for what it is, a short challanging run with a bit of a twist at the end. I am going to rate it as that, and not as a stand alone game, simply because 2-3 hours of play is hard to value, espically when at the end you want more!

Judging it as a peice of the orange box package, My verdict is….

9.0/10

Again Please understand, This rating is not compared to the rating a full game would get. For the short experience I was expecting and what I received I had a good time and enjoyed it, I am not taking points away becuase it was not longer, or did not have a super enganging story or any cut scenes. Pure fun alone!