Portal Critic Reviews

Portal can be bought separately or as part of the Orange Box package – Half-Life 2, Episodes 1 and 2, and Team Fortress 2 – but either way you get one of the best gaming experiences of the year.

Just as Valve's Half-Life 2 is the moody loner to Halo 3's high-school quarterback, Portal is smarter, cooler, funnier, and more sinister than almost any game this year.

Portal, tucked neatly alongside four other games, outshines them all and ensures itself a place in posterity.

From beginning to end, it's hard to find something not to like about Portal. Everything from the gameplay to the presentation are top-notch.

Putting Portal into the Orange Box package was a great idea on Valve's part.

One of the best single-player experiences of the year.

Portal is a magnificent puzzle game. The titillating wrongness of every solution and the wonky thinking required to get there make you feel like a space-folding genius, and yet you'll almost never get stuck.

It may be the least hyped part of the Orange Box but Portal is a strong addition to the lineup and really stands out on its own.

Portal is a sum of contradictions: it’s an FPS game with no weapons, no human characters, no complex scenery, but one that uses a simple and incredibly fun concept, with a well thought-of story and accessible to people of all ages (given they have minimal notions of moving the character around with the mouse and keyboard).

I was completely impressed with Portal. It’s a great game that’s innovative, fun, and contains a humorous storyline. My only real complaint was that it was too short, and I want more.

One of the most interesting and delightful things Valve's ever done, but also one of its least fulfilling. If only we had our own portal gun to bridge the gap to the first infusion of new content, perhaps we could forget it.

The more intricate the rat maze, the more necessary the reward -- part of Portal's sinister genius lies in the cheese-crumb trail it leaves. Puzzle solving is an end in itself, and the game's Skinner boxes (note that, like the computer intelligence pulling our strings, Valve remotely tracks player progress, indirectly seeing what stumps us) are supremely entertaining to crack in on-again-off-again sessions.

Ine of the most unique, funny and satisfying games of 2007, and we can't wait until Valve produces more of it.

Skilled players will portal their way through the nineteen levels in just a few hours, but this little puzzle game / tech demo provides plenty of entertainment and makes a great addition to The Orange Box.

The simple ideas are often the best, and Portal, quite simply, is one of the best ideas for a game we've ever seen. It's fantastically realised, brilliantly executed, and had me wrapped around its computerised finger for two-and-a-half unforgettable hours.

One of the most inventive, original, and down right entertaining games you’ll play this year.

So Portal does its job within the Orange Box compilation, taking a brilliant left-field idea and successfully merging it with Valve's universe over an entertaining few hours of gaming.

The idea stolen shamelessly from Prey, masterful implementation and... you won’t know when these three hours have passed. Zipping through portals and placing them on the fly (literally) makes for loads of fun, and the authors spice up the play with quite a story that’s not immediately visible and all the more enjoyable when discovered.

It's a hilarious game that offers a completely unique first-person experience and forces players to use their brains rather than their blasters.

With delightfully unique gameplay and fantastically witty writing, Portal is a huge success.