The Sprout

Review: Portal (PC) + Portal: Still Alive (XBLA)

Posted by Jeff the Fridge from Cardiff - Published on 01/08/2011 at 16:49
4 comments » - Tagged as Technology

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Portal was the first game I was ever into.

By that I mean I played nearly two days straight.

It was the first game I got on Steam because it was only ten pounds and, as my Dad put it, age appropriate.

But be warned! Portal is definitely one of the hardest games I have ever played, no joke, and I have played a lot of challenging games.

The idea is simple. You wake up to hear someone speaking through an overhead speaker. A blue portal opens and your journey through science begins. The whole affair is only about two or three hours long depending on your skill, but you will probably take much longer playing about with the portal gun or stumped at one of the puzzles.

On my first play through I took around six hours. Trying to solve some of the latter puzzles could take me ages before I realised I was meant to put a box there, shoot a blue portal there, stand on that button, shoot the orange portal there and so on.

There is only one voice in the whole game (if you don't count in the turrets) and that voice is the hilarious evil robot GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System), definitely one of the best villains in modern gaming. Her smooth tones guide you unhelpfully through the test chambers as you try to escape the Aperture Science Facility.

For the first two thirds of the game, you stay in the dazzling white chambers until GLaDOS tries to reward you and you learn what happened in the Aperture laboratories. Ellen McLain is definitely one of the best voice actors in gaming, up there with Mark Hammel as The Joker. Portal is yet another Valve masterpiece and shouldn’t be missed by anyone.

97% - Very nearly one of the best games I've ever played. The only game that was better had a "2" at the end of it.

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