If there was one criticism that could be leveled against Portal, it would be that the game was too short and left us all grasping for more. Portal: Prelude, an independent mod, attempts to fill that desire gamers have for more Portal by going above and beyond what most expect out of a mod.

Going Above and Beyond

The vast majority of mods that are released for PC games are strictly multiplayer, they focus on creating new game modes and online experiences. Portal: Prelude is an entirely single player mod, but the degree to which the creator has gone to replicate the experience of its name-sake is astounding.

Rather than just a collection of new maps for players to challenge, it’s a completely new story, complete with voice acting, plot twists, as well as advanced chambers and bonus maps just like the original Valve production.

Game Play

While not much has changed game play wise, the puzzles remain innovative, as well as difficult, extremely difficult. A warning to the casual gamer, some of the test chambers will have you tearing your hair out at the difficulty. You will die, in cheap ways, many times, but that’s part of the surprise you get from playing it.

There is also one new notable type of hazard, glowing walls of death will create an emancipation field like the ones near elevators that erase your portals, except these will kill you instantly. This new hazard is used in creative ways to create new puzzles to keep game play fresh and innovative.

New and creative puzzles combined with a high degree of difficulty should keep most players engaged with the game for at least as long as the original portal, if not longer.

The Bad

While this game is an amazing production for an independent free work, it’s not without things that could use some improvement. Difficult games can be enjoyable and satisfying, however some jumps required you to be absolutely perfect and having to do them over and over again until you get it just absolutely right got rather frustrating after a while and it felt like it was just being difficult for no real reason, challenge and a difficult solution are one thing, but there were a few parts that were just overly hard.

Additionally I felt that for all the effort the designed put into it, they could have found better voice actors and properly animated NPCs. At times NPCs will talk and their mouths will not move, and all of the dialogue from the game is made using a text to speech program, this would be acceptable if you were talking to a computer AI, but you are supposed to be listening to two Aperture employees, and it sounded dull and lifeless and caused lines that would have otherwise been quite good fall flat on their face.

Overall

This is probably one of the best mods to come out for Half-Life 2 thus far, it’s on par with the original Portal and anyone who was a fan of the first game will find themselves challenged in new ways. And to top it all off the story is quite good and a plausible lead in to Portal.  As long as you own Portal you will be able to play this mod and you can’t beat a price of ‘free’ for something with this level of quality.

Gameplay – 98/100

Story – 85/100

Graphics – 88/100

Overall – 90/100