Portal – Game Review from The Orange Box for the Xbox 360

 Check out this latest review by Chewbacca of the popular game Portal by Valve.

Story:  60 out of 100.

In Portal, you wake up in the Aperture Science facility. A mechanical voice of a woman speaks  and instructs you to get up and get ready to perform some tests. From here you have no choice but to obey and follow the instructions you are given.

Gameplay: 87 out of 100. 

As the lab rat, you must use your wit and intelligence to overcome and navigate, via first person perspective, through 19 tests in the Aperture Science facility. During the course of these tests, you will require the portal gun, which shoots two portals: a blue and an orange one which will serve both as an entrance and an exit. Besides a female, mechanical voice to guide you, you are entirely on your own. 

The tests center around different puzzles, which require a little or more thought to surpass. Sometimes you need to ascend to higher grounds, pass a huge gap or something else, using the two portals and your surroundings. The challenges change in insanity, as the female voice force you to navigate through rooms filled with acid pools and a living shooting range. Even though you are promised cake and grief counseling after end tests, they seem a little absurd. 

Note that portal isn’t a really game in itself, but something of an experiment Valve came up with. Though it can seem simple first at the start that isn’t the case. Portal can be completed in around two hours, but for the reviewer, it took four hours to figure the puzzles out and reload and try again, then I failed tremendously again and again.  

Voice acting: 90 out of 100.

The two characters, which appear in Portal, are the protagonist and the female voice, named GLaDOS. The protagonist doesn’t say a word through the whole game. But GLaDOS is voiced by opera singer and voice actress Ellen Mclain, who does an excellent job to the unusual AI. 

Graphics: 62 out of 100.

Portal is powered by the source engine, which were also used in the development of Half-life 2 and its two following episodes. Most surroundings you emerge through in Portal, are the test areas in the Aperture Science facility. As a fact, the graphics weren’t the top priority when creating Portal and that is easily seen. The surroundings are pretty much the same; on snow white walls you can shoot portals on and on the grey walls you can’t. The corridors are of the same materials from the white walls. The common course of death, besides electricity balls and trigger happy machine gun turrets, are the acid pools which looks like vomit from the last Friday bender and machine crushers. Mostly, it isn’t interesting to look at, but, to some rejoice, most of your time you will spend on thinking to overcome these challenges instead of looking at the surroundings. In Half-life 2 and the two other episodes, which were included besides Portal and also played on the Xbox 360, the graphics were doing a great job in making a believable and entertaining world, but in Portal, they aren’t that great. 

Conclusion

Portal, for its time back in 2007 and still today, is an interesting experiment. The story and graphics were not the concerning parts in the making of Portal, but more of its puzzles and originality. The playability is as long as you can endure to fail and fail the different puzzles and must reload to try again. But once you figure out how to solve a challenge, it was all worth it.