Portal Review: The cake is merely an enhancement of the truth.
By now, most of those who have picked up the Orange Box, Valve’s newest offering, have played through and beaten Portal. Those who have traversed through it’s puzzles have discovered a game with depth and style that is both engaging and ultimately satisfying. They have played a game that embraces all the things that games should be. However, there are those of you out there who have no picked up the “best value in gaming,” and have not ventured through Aperture Science with the help of your only friend, the Weighted Companion Cube (R.I.P.). For those lonely soles I will try to break this game down, and try to convince you that it’s time take the test: There will be cake.
The Good: This is a game that has taken everything that the industry has learned in the past 10 years and turned it flat out on it’s face. The game puts you in an utterly absurd situation, and things just continue to get stranger as the games go in. This is a surreal fantasy. The levels test your thinking, while the atmosphere try to trick you at every turn. Even the primary weapon in the game, the portal gun, can cause you to quickly lose your bearings. Like all good absurd fantasy, the game keeps a sense of humor that really needs a much more prominent place in gaming. All of this wraps up in one of the single best credit roll ever made.
The Bad: While this game plays like a masterpiece, it’s over in the time it takes to complete a demo of most games. The puzzles aren’t exactly mind benders either. There are quite a few moments where the game left me wishing for more. Perhaps it’s the fact that the portal gun leaves you a bit too powerful in your world, or that the levels were designed to only be a introduction to the possibilities of the portal world. It is hard to tell why there is not more to this game. However, it’s much better to finish a game and want more, than finish a game and be glad that you’re finally done with it.
The Bottom Line: Buy this. It’s short and it isn’t very complicated, but it’s batched with 2 of the other best games ever made: Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. You really can’t go wrong picking up 5 highly rated games for the price of one package.
January 10th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
nija
February 21st, 2008 at 1:15 am
Hi, can you tell me, where you found this photo, this cake looks magnificent.. I would like to have the recipe…