Portal Prelude: Review

I was one of the hundreds of people who were blown away by Portal, another ingenious game from the Valve Gods of Gaming. And thus everything Portal created via the community would never live up to it as it would be a terrible attempt to be on that level of deity.

This valved man strangly looks like some kind of religious icon...

But i was browsing Moddb, for nothing in particular just browsing through its haphazard navigation system when i actually found something without actually looking for it. (Ironically the only way to find something on the website). Portal Prelude, the game that would come before Portal Prelude. At once i clicked a button and was ready for its updates, i didn't have long to wait as it came out and i spent the next 3 hours downloading it.

Then i installed it and then went camping for the weekend. However on return i managed to actually play the single player mod. I am impressed by it, it has a whole new take on the Portal Universe and has a whole load of interesting and different puzzles of which to solve. The levels were very well made, with some excellent set design even to the point that i kept getting that OS Pages Poll memory low error and a crash out of it all. It's like my computer was blown away by its high tech design and complicated puzzles.

The voice of entertainment is two people who i assume are the voices you can get windows to simulate via one its pointless programmes. Which were not really funny though I think a couple of lines sparked a bit of a smile but nothing on the same lines as GlaDOS.

Though that is as far as this mod really goes, the puzzles are somewhat impossible for me to figure out that I had to noclip around the map to figure it out properly. But the main problem here is that I am slightly lazy and that unlike portal the entire elements of the problem are not visible to the user. A lot of the problems are hidden away behind moving walls which do not seem to be very productive towards the completion of the puzzle. I think that although they may be drastically obvious to the designers or they either require the user to have an insane ability to figure out the problem within 5 seconds so as not to fall to that green water death. With all of the awesomeness of this mod including its cut scenes, animation and effects the puzzles, for which portal is based, is what will lose it a lot of its players. Portal was tough at some parts but doable when you could see everything that was required for the puzzle, even the last tests had that.

All of the original cast are present in this mod...

I also found that I spent a lot of time standing around waiting for dialogue to be completed without being able to ride a lift expecting another puzzle or just do something whilst two characters chat to each other whilst you stand in a corridor where little is happening.

The mod was not really fun, I noclipped through some puzzles just because I got fed up of trying to do them and wanted to get to some more story. The end story and the lead up to Portal is a lot of awesome stuff which is impressive with some effects that I would not have expected to see in such a mod.

With its bugs and challenges the mod hardly has the wick to hold a candle to Portal and with all of its good points it still falls short.

(4 out of 10)