A necessary post about the fantastic game from Valve, Portal. To start off on a bad note, it’s disappointingly short, and pretty easy. The game and the advanced levels were completed a matter of hours after I received the Orange box through the post last week.

Now for the good; the different, interesting but yet simple, game style make the game so incredibly playable.

It’s fun and rewarding to spend a few minutes using the portal gun to try to jump over something and then realising a way of using momentum more effectively and flying to the goal. Momentum being conserved through portals, making them a fantastic ways to propel yourself. I wont say the game is physically realistic, I mean, there is a ‘portal gun’ voiding any realism on first glance, however, there is some loyalty to physics in motion and aspects of weight in the physics engine. Combining this with the abstract Portal device makes a wonderful mix that is very fun to play, making you think differently about the possibilities of moving yourself around and achieving the solution.

The puzzle elements never got to the point of frustration either, and the touches of humour lighten the mood and blanket the fact that there are you are almost alone in the ‘Apature Science’ laboratory.

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