Portal - Mac Game Review

Portal is an interesting kind of game. Have you ever played a first person shooter that has no enemies? Well, that's what Portal is. You are given a gun that shoots both blue and orange portals. When you step through a blue portal, you exit out of an orange portal. The objective of this game is to get through all of the different floors of the Aperture Research Labs.

This game was originally designed for the Xbox 360, and is available in the Xbox Live Marketplace. I play Portal on my Mac, because a few weeks ago, Steam (the gaming engine that Portal runs on) announced that if you download it by a certain date, you get the game for free! I had to take advantage of this great opportunity, and quickly downloaded (well, as quickly as I could, the file is pretty large at about 3 gigabytes) the game to my PC. Just recently, I got a Macbook Pro and decided to load the game onto it. I was still able to do this free, because I had downloaded the game before.

The graphics in Portal are some of the best I have ever seen on a computer. Maybe this is because I am new to my Macbook, which has a great graphics card, but I love the graphics of this game. It has seamless 3D graphics that don't skip at all, even when you pan at very high speeds. The physics engine is logical in every instance except for when you jump into a portal. For example, when you jump into a blue portal, you will pop out of the corresponding orange portal at the same speed you hit the blue portal. In the words of the narrator "Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out."

Another odd feature about this game is that your character is female. Most games have male characters only, including Call of Duty, Halo, and Medal of Honor. To see a female character randomly placed in a first person shooter (with no enemies) is very cool.

For more information, including gameplay videos from Portal as well as other games, check out my YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/ICOZANE

In the end, I would rate Portal an 8 out of 10. This is because the game is fun, but often too challenging for the average player. It is also difficult to use the secondary click to shoot the correct colored portals, which makes the game sort of difficult. This is a great game, but I don't suggest getting it right now on the PC or Mac. This is for two reasons. The first is that most PCs won't have the processing power or graphics card to play this game well. The second is that the game is no longer free. You could get it through a torrent, but that would be illegal.