Reviews - Pauolo

I just tried that mod last week, but I kept in mind the original Portal while playing to fully appreciate it and making an honest review.

For the general atmosphere, I simply loved all those new textures for the test chambers, I believe it's one of the first reason to just try the mod. It simply scraps the sanitized ambiance of Portal to switch with something warmer and relaxing. Trying something completely different in design was just the thing to do to not make the mod like new test chambers for Aperture Science. Also, the music was just perfectly made and fit really well to the mod.

About the whole difficulty and challenge, I didn't like how hard was the main campaign. I'm not saying I'm against a bit of challenge, but having too much is frustrating when you've already figured how to progress but can't make it. However, I prefer the extended play which was easier to beat. Then, I must say I really enjoyed the new gameplay elements, especially all those cubes with different functions. It was more thinking with portals AND cubes than simply with portals and that was also a good choice, same for adding the gravity gun and adding to it a new and fun function, or the interesting new testing elements.

Now, about three points I really didn't appreciate. I recognize the background story of the original Portal wasn't really developed, even with the Half-life series behind it, but I was sad to not find a real story in Blue Portals, and the end of the main campaign was just confusing, like "Your test is over, now you can GTFO". So in the end it felt like "one of those challenge games". Also, the mod is still relatively short, even with the extra maps, and suffer from many errors, like sometimes broken elements that keep you from progressing. A bit of maintenance and a general check-up of the programs would be more than welcome.

In the end, I'm not rating 9 (I never rate 10) because of those black points, but still I think an 8 is well-deserved for all the team's work.

I have already given my review after beta-testing it, I won't change it even if some contents appear to have been taken from other mods. I'm not rating for some textures or sounds, I'm rating on the mod itself which I think was good enough to be comparable to the first Portal game by Valve.