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Portal (PC)
Portal (PC)
Portal is a puzzle type game, in which you place portals to make your way to the end of each level. You shoot a small energy ball which opens a portal on impact.
Portal starts with babysteps. You begin with a minimalistic UI (only a crosshair) and nothing in your hands while you listen to a nice voice which tells you what's going on.
You are led by the hand through the first lessons: Whats a Portal? Does it take me to another dimension/world/timepoint ? For those of you who haven't already heard about or played Portal, the answer is No. Its no black hole, just a portal. What goes in the blue portal comes out the orange and vice versa. That includes you too! The interesting part is, that portals can be placed not only on walls but on the ground and the ceiling either and their placement can be rotated so get ready for a fun joyride. The first puzzles are short but the following get longer/harder.
After some minutes you get to place (shoot) one of the portals yourself. After a short amount of time and the first more challenging puzzle, you get to place the second portal too. Now this is where the real fun begins (and thats most probably where players shoot 2 portals next to each other, be it in a corner or a ceiling/ground combo and start fooling around ;).
Portal has 2 kinds of switches: there are big red buttons which are hold pressed by metal crates/boxes and collector switches which trigger if an energy ball (remember them from HL2 ?) is placed in them. Those switches open doors which are vital to your progression.
Having no health point count may make you believe you are in safety, but there are quite some ways of passing away in Portal (the game autosaves after every accomplished step of a puzzle so don't worry).
You can die by falling into acid, whacking yourself to death with a cube (done that one ;) , get grilled by an energy ball and be shot to death.
Eh? Be shot to death? But I thought there are no weapons nor enemies!
Yes and no. There are no weapons in Portal and no conventional enemies.
But there are autoguns and may I tell you, the cutest autoguns you have ever seen!
The AI GLaDOS's voice, acted by Ellen McLane gives the game its own touch of flair. She does a great job sounding like a machine while putting sarcasm and emotions into her voice. The German GLaDOS voice is just as good as the original.
Sadly Portal is a short one, but after playing through the game (and enjoying the wonderfully humorous credits) you aren't finished yet. There are some bonus levels and developer commentary. The build in bonus levels are the levels you already know but with a twist to them. Something is different in each and every level and it always makes it more of a challenge to solve the quasi new puzzle. There are fan made bonus levels by now which you can enjoy too. The developer commentary is served to you in little bites in the form of floating speech bubbles, placed all around the game and it pays off to listen to them, so basically you'll play at least twice through the game but the fun doesn't decrease the second time at all!
What can I expect from Portal?
You can expect:
- Innovative riddles which require out of the box thinking
- Eloquent sarcasm
- 2-3 hours of gameplay (dependent on skill)
- No Weapons
- Credits you don't want to miss
- A lot of fun =)
Portal is part of the Orange Box which is available for PC and Xbox 360. Portal is seperatley available for PC through Steam. The Orange Box will be released for the PS3 on 23. November 07.
Portal is the official successor of the technology demo Narbacular Drop made as a project by Nuclear Monkey Software at the DigiPen Institute of Technology. The whole development team has been hired by Valve for the design and development of Portal. The story has been written in cooperation with Half-Life-Author Marc Laidlaw.
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This is my first mini-review. I'd like to hear some feedback so please don't hold back!
Firstly, I think you should have begun the text with a short description of what the game is actually about - there may yet be people out there who haven't heard of it, and for them the review is most interesting. So a line saying basically that Portal is a puzzle game, the aim of which is to master a series of levels aided by a portal-making device would have been better, imo. Also a description of how the levels work would have been good ("switches open doors, open doors are good" - something like that ;)).
Apart from that, you should perhaps have put the name of the game in bold print, and there are two typos in the first line in italics.
That's about all I can find to nag about, and I enjoyed reading it. =)
Thank you for your constructive criticism!
I can't find the typos you are talking about, could you point them out to me please?
This sentence:
"Eh? Be shot do death? But I thought there are no weapons nor enemys!"
The "do" is obviously supposed to be a "to", and "enemys" should be "enemies". ;)
Jesus Christ!
Shocking how one can ignore his own typos while reading them over and over again. Maybe I should print it out next time before posting^^
Printing it out probably wouldn't help you because you read what you know should be there. Therefore one usually asks other people to check for typos in your own text.
Anyway: Fairly good review in my opinion.
Thanks.
I've heard that journalists print their texts out because its easier to spot typos on paper than on screen.
Maybe it does for some people or just journalists. It obviously doesn't work for me (and I'm not a journalist).
To the admins: I think this image shows the point how the portals work http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/803/803189/portal_1184...
You'll need to provide an image with at least 600px in width and I'll gladly do an update.
FYI: Please check the latest revision of you review to see what I've changed.
I think this one would make a good representation of Portal: http://media.pc.ign.com/media/842/842671/img_4944805.html
Sorry for the loads of typos! I'll watch it and won't let it happen again (at least not as bad as this time ;)
But, I think the apostrophe in "There are no weapons in Portal and no conventional enemy's." doesn't belong there.
Image added and you're probably right on enemies.
First of all: Despite the criticism that will follow I think that you have done a pretty good job.
However I also think that Portal shouldn't be reviewed in the same way as nearly every other puzzle game. I think that people who haven't played the game yet (shame on them!) will already mostly know the general mechanism of the game, but what they obviously don't know (because otherwise they'd have already played it) is the resourcefulness/imagination that was put into the game by the designers and which doesn't only turn the game into a treasure chest for the puzzle genre, but also concerning general game design, learning curve, screenplay and the issue how to best award the player throughout a game.
And this is the REALLY tricky part, because it is very hard to talk about that all in a convincing way and not to spoil something of the game.
So the bar lies pretty high when reviewing Portal. For your first review you chose a very difficult game to talk about.
You are right, it isn't easy to present Portal because it is like nothing before, but this is a collaborative news platform and I can edit any suggestion into the news article. =)
Thanks for the praise!
Please add following information:
(1) Who made it (Valve/Nuklearmonkey Software)
(2) Where to get it (Orange Box/Steam)
And I'll move it to "Top".
You're right. Added the info.
Thanks.
To out myself, I haven't played Portal yet, mostly because I'm not really interested in HL2 or Team Fortress, so Portal would be the only thing I'd play from the box, and secondly because I despise Steam, because it's way to curious what the user is doing when and where.
All that aside, when I read reviews or comments about Portal, or even saw videos, I noticed something about a nice female voice, some talking guns, some weird cube, and everybody is talking about cake, which I totally don't get.
Could you shed some light on these things without spoiling the story?
Because these 'Elements' won't combine very well with a puzzle-game in my head.
Any help is appreciated, but "you had to be there to understand" is also a perfectly valid answer.
To answer your question: (and hoping not to spoil too much)
In Portal you advance through several testchambers (which can be called puzzles if you like it) and the nice female voice is the only thing communicating with you (except for the talking guns you encounter in some testchambers) and at some points through the game "the voice" promises you cake if you finish all (19) testchambers.
And for the weird cube:
Sorry, but "you had to be there to understand".
Hope that (at least somewhat) answered your questions.
It is really just not possible to talk about the magic of Portal without spoiling it. And in my opinion Portal is worth buying the Orange Box for; to put that aside, Half-Life 2 is again amazing.
Let me try to say this in the following way: Before Portal came out I thought: "Meh, just another puzzle game, worth playing for a few minutes probably." When Portal was out everybody told me "Portal has the best ending of a game I've seen in years, the final stage is awesome, the credits are overwhelming, the nemesis is on one level with Shodan, the voice acting is brilliant, you will fall in love with sentry guns and cubes and ... there will be cake."
So when I heard all this I thought: "I should really play that game!"
But what I also thought was: "Nothing can surprise me anymore, it was hyped in such a strong way that I will probably be disappointed."
I played it. I loved it. It blew me away. It's my game of the year. If not of "years".
This is the only thing I can tell you about it without telling too much.
And yeah, you'll get through it in 4 hours. But trust me: You will give a damn. Because these 4 hours rock.
Oh, and you WILL understand the thing about the cake while playing it. And you will WANT that cake. ;)
... but perhaps you won't want to eat it, because of all the rhubarb.
;)
well, it fits better in my head now, only remaining question would be, is it good enough to pay full price for the orange box, just for portal? (on the other hand, I played every Halflife Game including the expansion Blue Shift, or Episode 1, I just lost my interest in shooters after Stalker, but maybe Ep2 is worth playing)
But Steam is still a big minus on my board.
Well, if you're really only interested in Portal, then you might want to wait for prices to drop - or find a friend willing to lend you his copy, like I did. Like the review said, Portal is rather on the short side. On the other hand, the first custom maps have been released, and if that trend continues, the replay-value could rise dramatically.
Personal opinion: I wouldn't recommend getting Portal as a stand-alone. $19.95 is too pricey for it and getting the Orange Box only makes sense if you plan on playing TF2.
How about HL2: Episode 2 you ask? Well, I wasn't exactly thrilled about it and I presume I'm not alone on this: Hardly anyone talks about Episode 2 atm. or even when it came it.
My recommendation: Similar to what Flo_the_G said, I'd recommend you to wait until the price for Portal drops and then pick it up. They might have an offer for the Steam version around Xmas.
Thanks for all the info and help, feels like a great community here already.
What Knurrunkulus said, sounded really great, made me want to play it RIGHT NOW, but I think I take Flo's and Jan's recommendation and wait a bit.
Thank you all.
P.S. I was lashing out at Steam in above comments, but you guys are actually using it, what do you think?
(Wikipedia has a good summary on the most common concerns.)