Portal

Beautifully rendered odd-ball puzzle game with incredible physics engine

Once you start thinking with portals, you'll never go back. Portal is unlike any other game you'll ever have played or ever will play. At its core is a very simple idea in which you are given a portal gun which fires blue and orange portals. They connect to each other, so if you walk through the orange hole, you exit through the blue hole. It all sounds simple enough until you realise you can use it to escape from seemingly locked rooms and to jump incredible distances.

Gameplay

You open your eyes in a post-apocalyptic world trapped in a room, armed only with a portal gun and the voice of an incredibly sarcastic robot who is still running the scientific test centre in which you find yourself. Once you escape from the room, you enter a series of test chambers, where you need to manipulate switches, buttons and lasers to complete each stage. Expect to be insulted and mocked by the computer voice as you proceed, and watch out for times when you go "off piste" as this helps you to develop the story line and work your way to a wonderfully unexpected finale.

Strategies

The key to Portal is to fully investigate each level before you start firing portals around. Fortunately, the game auto-saves and you get an infinite amount of lives, but it can be frustrating to fall in the toxic water or get shot by a turret 20 minutes into a level. All walls that be used for portals are white, and often the layout of the walls will give you a clue about how to proceed. The other main strategy as you get further through the game is to use falling from great height into portals as a way of gaining momentum for massive jumps.

Pros

• Beautiful graphics
• Funny storyline and characters
• Novel concept for a puzzle game

Cons

• You're on rails so no exploration
• No multi-player function
• Not much replay value once you've completed the game