Magrunner: Dark Pulse

The makers of this game have been able to draw a surprising amount of variation from the simple idea of magnetized boxes attracting and rejecting each other. Some of the puzzles are just mind-melting, and there are a lot of them.

Ever wandered what Portal would be like with magnetism instead of portals? No? Well, you should still give this game a try. You can fly through the levels and give yourself a headache just as with the aforementioned game. Magrunner is great physics-based game that will definitely make you think. My only quarrel with its developers is their choice that opposites repel instead of attract (as is the case with reality).

After seeing that it was made by Frogwares, I was really skeptical of what the quality would be like, as I have played one of their Sherlock Holmes games and it was absolutely horrendous. However, I must say, I haven't enjoyed a new game quite this much in a long time. First off, I want to explain my title. This game really can't decide what it wants to be. Throughout the game it tries to be a Portal-based puzzle game, an indie horror game, an atmospheric game, ext. What I feel it does best are the puzzles and the atmosphere. The story is ok, I guess, although it has a really terrible ending IMO, and it is highly forgettable. In my opinion, the story is there much more to serve the atmosphere. Second, I just want to say how delightful it is after playing some of the old Sierra adventure games to find a puzzle game I don't have to cheat on. Seriously, I got through the entire thing without feeling that any puzzles were impossible. And they were still really difficult, especially towards the end, so I think this game is a really good example of good puzzle design. Anyway, let's just sum this up into a Pros and Cons list: Pros: *Great atmosphere *Puzzles that don't ever feel impossible *despite using the Unreal Engine it runs really well Cons: *If you know anything about magnetism in the real world, this game will frustrate you as in it objects of a like charge attract, and there is no way I know of to change this. *forgettable story *overuse of the cliche horror stinger sound

I didn't think a puzzle game would interest me but it was free and I downloaded it. Now I have heard of portal and heard it is very similar to this. Maybe I should have listened to the hype about these types of games. At first I only played a little bit getting through the first few levels which is basically tutorials. From that first impression it looked like that would be it, just bland looking levels with puzzles using boxes and platforms while becoming more difficult. The simple fact that it becomes more difficult intrigued me though to continue through to the main story. You'll know when you get there because of the change in setting. It might just be my laptop that can't process some of the techanical aspects which makes the graphics look only decent and game speed a little slow but it doesn't stop me from trying to get to the end. I recommend it to anyone who likes first-person perspecive and puzzle games.

I read people comparing this to Portal, and complaining that it's both too much as and not enough as Portal. Don't listen to Portal fanboys and fangirls, they obviously can't get past those two games to take the game in its own merit. As I played both Portal and Portal 2, I can say that the only thing that these have in common is being 1st-person physics logic puzzle, with two... colours? I found this to be somehow more difficult than either Portal, but also with perfect difficulty curve—so much so, it's a straight raising line. Didn't bump into any roadblocks. Everything was solvable within a couple of minutes and looking around the area a bit, but one place was really frustrating—though that just may have been mental exhaustion at that point. One bad thing I'll say is you can't jump when you carry stuff—it all works fine without it, but would be a nice quality-of-life improvement if that was possible. All levels appear to be made so you don't get stuck when you mess up something and I found no bugs (not saying there are none, just didn't notice anything). The story is wonderfully creepy, just ending is a bit anticlimatic. *Not bad*, just anticlimactic.