Portal

The Good
The story was amazing, and the fact it used artificial intelligence as the main enemy of the game was exactly what I was looking for at the first time I played it. I would watch every lets-play on youtube as many times as possible as I waited to actually buy the game- and when I did I was so happy to get it that I beat it in a matter of three days. I love how the gameplay was, and how not every 'chamber', or test level, was easy and how you had to use your mind for quite a few of them.

The Bad
I really didn't like how short the game was in general. They could have added a lot more interesting things to the first game and still had it lead up to the seemingly even more popular sequel. Personally, I could play through this game with my eyes closed- I memorized the levels since I played it through so much, and over time it just got flat out boring.

The Bottom Line
Personally, this game is one of the coolest games I've played in awhile. Sure, it has some pros and cons about it and its not all completely amazing. Sure, it gets boring after awhile for people like me, but it is definitely worth getting.

The Good
I haven't seen a fresher idea for a game mechanism in years. And to find one that actually leaves much up to the player's imagination is rare. The portal weapons work like a charm, as does the physics in the game.

The Bad
However, I can't shake the feeling that I'm playing around with a tech demo. I have a hard time calling it a game. Most gamers will probably finish it in a couple of hours and that only adds to the demo feeling of the "game".

The story is thin, vague and not much to spur the player on. I got this game for free but had I payed money for it I would have felt even more cheated. It's fun to play around with and the gameplay is superbly executed - but I just don't see a whole game in there.

The Bottom Line
Imagine a typical 3D shooter without weapons. Instead you have the ability to shoot portals on almost any solid surface. If you shoot one portal on the right wall, and the other on the left and then go through the right one - you will come out of the left portal. These portals can be applied to ceilings and floors as well.

Now, the traditional shooter becomes a puzzle game where you need to use the portals - and your imagination - to get from point A to point B.

The Good
Portal will always be known as one of the best written games of all times. Every single joke lands on the spot because the voice acting of SHO... I mean GLaDOS is fantastic and she doesn't talk your ear off (a virtue Portal 2 unfortunately forgot).

This is one of the only puzzle games which have a very polished difficulty curve: the puzzles never feel too easy or too hard in context of the game progression. The mechanics are simple, but the designers found many approaches to make clever puzzles out of them.

The Bad
The downside of the polished difficulty curve is that most of the game feels like a tutorial. Only in the last chapter the game stops holding your hand, but just at that moment it also stops introducing more difficult or complex puzzles and only iterates. That's normal for puzzle games, but in this case it stands out negatively because the whole game is relatively short (at most three hours) and the previous chapters were exceptionally varied. In the end, it makes the last chapter a bit tedious.

The Bottom Line
I believe it is a hard challenge to find someone on MobyGames who hasn't played Portal before, especially because Valve regularly gave it away for free on Steam. If you are one of this rare species, you absolutely have to give it a try - it will only cost you a few hours of your life, but in return you receive one of the funniest games of all times.