Portal is a first person puzzle/shooter and, like Team Fortress 2, is one of the five games included in The Orange Box. Portal is easily the most original and interesting of the bunch, as well as being one of the most innovative and genuinely fun games of the past couple of years.

Portal shares a similar control scheme with most first person shooters, but the gameplay itself is what sets it apart and makes it a truly great game. Instead of simply shooting the bad guys and packing as much heat as possible, Portal simply gives you the Arpeture Science Handheld Portal Device (or “Portal Gun”) that enables you to create portals to solve various puzzles as you try to escape the Arpeture Science Laboratorie’s Enrichment Center. There are no enemies to shoot (although a few robotic drones serve as obstacles on occasion) and no weapons other than the Portal Gun and your own puzzle solving skills. Its kind of like Tetris meets Goldeneye!

The other strong point of Portal is its writing. The villain of the game, GLaDOS (an evil computer who is using the silent protagonist as a kind of test subject) has a wide array of random and nonsensical babbles about things like cake and Weighted Companion Cubes that constantly entertains and never gets tiresome or boring like most video game dialogue that isn’t spoken by Peppy Hare. GLaDOS has become one of my favorite video game villains if for no other reason than her humorous dialogue. She also serves as a very entertaining final boss fight, even if it is a little on the easy side.

There’s not much to note on the music side of Portal, except of course, the ending theme song “Still Alive” (which is sung by GLaDOS) which adds yet even more humor to the game and has earned great acclaim in it’s own right.

Portal can get challenging at times, but it’s never impossibly difficult to the point that you just want to give up. There was probably only one instance where I got any bit “frustrated” with the game (where you have to continuessly teleport yourself to higher elevated platforms), but it just kept pushing me to try harder until I could complete it.

The entire Portal mechanic works wonderfully and never feels broken. You will have to constantly use your brain to try to figure out how to use the portals for solving the various obstacles. Not to mention looking at your character through one portal into the next just looks so cool.

Portal is a fantastic video game that should not be missed by those who love the art of video games. It may be short in length, but it makes up for it with its writing, its innovation and, of course, its gameplay. If you love great video games, you must play Portal!

The cake is a lie!

(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10)
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