Portal
Before beginning Portal, I had heard a lot of great things about the game. The introduction in the game was fluent going straight to learning the basic mechanics. Each level contained a specific task to do and once that task was completed, the player would be told to go into an elevator by a women over the loud speaker. Once in the elevator, a long loading screen would appear and once loaded the next level would start. Even though there were flaws with Portal, the overall game is great.
The biggest problem that Portal had was that it was so short. I already knew going into the game that it was short, so I was able to spread it for a couple of days by playing the other games in the orange box package. But the game only consisted of 19 levels in which the first few were like tutorials, and depending on how fast you can solve the puzzles will depend on if the game takes you 2 to 3 hours to finish it. Portal took me about two and a half hours to complete. Another flaw with portal is that the first 3/4 of the game starts to get repetitive after awhile. I felt like I had to do the same thing in every level with just a few mechanics that I learned in the tutorial. Also the laboratory environment that you play in starts to get old. Because I had to keep using the same mechanics, and the environment barely changed, I began to get bored playing the game. The last and biggest problem I had with Portal was that the loading screens between levels are really long. Also loading up my saved game took really long. The long load screens really made me impatient.
Many things made overshadowed the problems and made this an incredible game. Onve of the best parts of Portal were the mechanics used in the game. Even though it got a little repetitive, the portal gun worked like a charm. You could shoot one of the portals out on almost any part of the laboratory walls and then shoot shoot your other portal on a different part of the wall. Going into one of the portals would make you come out the other portal with the same momentum you went into the first with. Using these mechanics allowed you to solve all of the puzzles in the game. Which brings up another great part of Portal, the puzzle design. In the later levels, it took all of the mechanics you learned in the tutorial to solve the puzzles, and the puzzles ended up being the whole room of a level. Even though some of the puzzles were hard and took me a while to figure out, it was fun trying a section over and over again and not having the urge to go and look at a guide online. I had a great sense of accomplishment figuring out a puzzle on my own and eventually finishing the game on my own. What I thought made this game so great was the last 1/4 part of the game leaving behind the repetitive nature of the game. Once I reached the last part of the game I felt a sense of urgency and suspense that made me not want to stop playing until I finished the game. The dialogue was also a great part of Portal. I was surprised to see myself giggling about some of the things that the women said over the loud speaker. The best part of this game though is the ending. The last battle is really awesome and fits perfectly with the rest of the game. Then the last song during the end credits is amazing. Anybody who has a system to play this game on should definitely pick this game up. GO PLAY IT NOW!
