Magrunner: Dark Pulse

Terrible. The gameplay consists of a series of sliding tile puzzles with just enough goofy physics to make life annoying when your stack of crates flips out and scatters across the level. Once you've gone through the first section of the game, you've seen just about everything it has to offer. The horror elements are anemic. Flickering lights. Goofy monsters and wall textures that look like they came out of a DOOM .wad. Unbelievably tenuous Cthulhu mythos references-- you could lose the dorky Deep Ones and the silly story, and the game would be unharmed. Lose the goofy Future Facebook Contest thing too-- it brings nothing to the party either. Whatever elements of creeping... whatever are neatly extinguished when you get the ability to summon magnets shaped like toy dogs. At that point, things go from unimpressive to vaguely ridiculous. Most damning is that it's utterly charmless. The vast majority of the game is spent in Portal-style test chambers and being shuttled between them along an infinite wall of loading doors while the protagonist and his handlers witter away at one another. There's a sense of vast scale outside the chambers, yes, but nothing to evoke curiosity or fear, even when it starts raining fish(men).

Still after playing for a few hours I am not sure what to think of this game. It feels like a bad portal clone with bright disco colors. The "story" doesn't fit with the whole game and feels forced. Characters doesnt add anytthing special to the game and make the "loading" / "dialogs" only longer. The puzzles are quite challanging so that is the only bonus for this game. When playing i'am annoyed by the slow dialogs, nohthing is really happening and the puzzles are just plain boring due the lack of an interesting storyline, there's no goal for completing the game at all. in short, only buy this game if you really enjoy weird puzzle games.

The game is "Meh". That's just the best way to describe it. I see the effort that was made to create it, but still a "Meh" game. Musics are royalty free stuff you can find on the web. Sounds too. Cute story but clearly made by an amateur without any knowledge of story telling. The gameplay is fine, the game is clearly a "Portal-wannabe", but definitly lacks the mastery to create such a compelling and deep gameplay. For its price is fine, it gives a bit of enterteinment.

This game is superb, it takes a lot of influence from the Portal games and adds in Magnetism, which honestly made this game a lot from challenging and fun for me. There are certain puzzles that won't be easy to finish unless you take some time to meditate over them, don't be impatient. This is not a game for children or anyone with a low attention span, some levels are difficult, and seem impossible, but it has an interesting albeit undeveloped story that goes places you won't expect.

If you played and enjoyed Portal series then you'll like this style of game. Compared to the portal series, I found Magrunner to have more challenging puzzles while Portal had better writing, but only slightly better. Magrunner does a great job building the atmosphere. Where else will you be expected to outrun a monster from R'lyeh while solving a magnetic puzzle? Having Cthulhu stare you down while trying to work the puzzles can be unnerving. This game is well worth the price. If they make a sequel I will pre-order without question.