"Great concept, crap game..."

Portal's developers seem to have put all their energy into one aspect of their game and then decided that the greatness of it meant they could skimp on all the others. The great aspect is the portal gun, while everything else pretty much suckles.

You are a lab rat, dumped into a weird maze of puzzles and hazards, and your only real help is provided by the portal gun, a gun which fires entry and exit portals into walls, floors, ceilings and some other surfaces. You basically use this gun to create your own routes through the mazes: sometimes this is as simple as firing an entry portal at this end of the chasm and an exit portal at the far side - walk into the entry and you come out the exit one. Simple. Other times you will have to send objects through so that you can use them in other places, sometimes you will use the portals to trick the game into letting you progress.

The best bit about the game is how it messes with your head. It's easy enough for a game to create a door in one place and another door in another place - you walk through one and come out the other. This has been done plenty of times and those are usually called teleporters. But it's not often a game allows you to see your exit point through the entry portal, and it's not often a game lets you place teleporters where you want them, rather than in predefined, unmovable positions. This is what will have you very confused, because the game will let you figure out the correct place to put your portals - put them in the wrong place and you'll still get some funny results and head-scratching moments, you just won't get past the puzzles.

To clarify what the portals are like: you can only ever have two, an entry one and an exit one. Fire the entry one into the wall in front of you, then turn and fire the exit into the wall behind you, so they're directly 'facing' each other. Now, like in a bathroom with two facing mirrors on the walls, you will see an everlasting loop - walk into the portal in front of you and ahead you will see yourself doing the same again, and ahead of that you will see another you, and so on. Fire a portal at your feet and another one directly above your head, then drop a box through the floor one and it will narrowly miss your head as it falls from above. Hopefully you get the picture, though no text can describe how truly mind-bending the effects can be. But is this enough to make a game on its own, no matter how many baffling puzzles are thrown in?

Not for me, it isn't. Portal suffers in virtually all other departments, and I can't help feeling that if this game had been properly packaged with classy graphics, sound and other production values it could have been fantastic. As it is, you will probably not really want to play it again once you complete it two or three times, because once the puzzles are done there is not much left. It's like a completed crossword book. I guess you could play with the portal gun a bit more in the trickier levels, but I think a sandbox section should have been included for this. The gun is far more fun than the game which made it.

Most stuff in the game is white, since you're trapped in a lab (later levels where you are trying to escape do vary it a bit, but this is still not much improvement). Everything is bland and pretty boring, no matter where you look. The portals aside, there are no impressive effects and nothing that hasn't been seen in other, older games. Sound is very rubbish, including the robot voice that other people seem to think is so hilarious. It's pretty childish in a cynical sort of way, and it might make you smile once or twice, but so what.

It's also a pretty short game, and I think many more levels could have been included. If there had been, along with far better graphics, sound, etc. the game may even have pipped HL:E2 for the prize of best game in the Orange Box. But it's left as an entertaining sideshow - you won't forget it in a hurry and you'll hope that the concept is given its due in some better game to come, but the original Portal is far fro mthe finished article.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/21/08

Game Release: Portal (EU, 04/11/08)