Status killerstar Dec 14, 2018
This is a portal clone that feels uninspired from the start. Right there, before you even start to play, you get a portal reference in the subtitle for the Prelude: "piece of cake". The setting is all to familiar. You are imprisoned in a secret weapons testing lab and you go through chambers solving puzzles to... gather data?
Anyway. From …
This is a portal clone that feels uninspired from the start. Right there, before you even start to play, you get a portal reference in the subtitle for the Prelude: "piece of cake". The setting is all to familiar. You are imprisoned in a secret weapons testing lab and you go through chambers solving puzzles to... gather data?
Anyway. From my first 40-ish minutes of play, I can say that the puzzles are a total bust. The main mechanic has potential: a "magnetic" (more on that quotes later) gun that you can use to pull and push things (like the all to familiar boxes that activate buttons). The catch is that Newton's third law applies. You use the fact that you are pulled when you push to jump higher. In soviet Russia, the portals shoot you.
The problem is that the game's over-reliance on this mechanic basically translated in turning a puzzler into a bad platformer. Chambers are not solved, they are navigated. But in such an imprecise way, that I had to try the same jump a dozen times. So, yeah, the whole "performing the solution is harder than figuring it out" issue is in full force. Even worse is the game's other abused mechanic of having to throw cubes to far away cubes. The problem is not only that the cube is right in your face, making it impossible to actually aim, but the actual trajectory of the cube once launched is almost random.
Oh, and about that quotes. Is ridiculous. You have ostensibly a "magnetic gun" but you can only interact with some specific items even though everything around you is made of f-ing metal. Why? Because. In Portal, portals could also only be placed in some specific surfaces, of course, but if you can accept a magical gun that makes portals, then is not a stretch to accept that there's also some anti-portal surface coating. But if you introduce a magnetic gun, then you need to give me some explanation to why I does nothing with the metallic floor I'm standing on.
And this is not just cosmetic. Remember how in Portal you could break cameras by placing portals in their walls? That was an important mechanic that allowed the player to express themselves; a small act of rebellion,if you will. In this game, not only your magnetic gun does nothing to those metallic cameras, but you can throw boxes all they long and they will go right through them as if they were not even there.