Magrunner: Dark Pulse

Yes the game really wants to be like Portal but it lacks the charm and originality of the first Portal. And spoiling the cthulhu twist in the description of the game doesnt help. The graphics are nice but sometimes the game just doesnt give enough visual or other hints like Portal design did and you get stuck. The mechanics arent explained and the game isnt much fun at points because of this.

I did not expect such a satisfying puzzle. Thanks to the ability to create magnetic points anywhere, we have a certain freedom in solving puzzles. Level of complexity suited me better than in similar games. I really liked the arcade elements and the escape from the monsters levels. In fact, the only drawback is the weak plot.

And it's actually a pretty good "Portal but..." Mechanics are introduced and taught with good pacing, puzzles are quite diverse. From the story perspective, there's not much of it, but what is there fits quite well. I was wary of how well would Lovecraftian mythos mesh with futuristic setting, but Frogwares pulled it of.

I was expecting little more than a contrived Portal Clone and, admittedly, the first few levels looked like they had been copy-pasted from Portal, but the unique puzzle mechanics and ever-evolving maps that make a unique and worthwhile challenge. The mechanics are straight forward and are elaborated upon effectively without the need for dialogue or tutorials. The story cheapened the whole experience for me a bit, though.

I really love this game. Its mechanism (you can magnetize objects pos. or neg. shown in different colours) is quite easy but the puzzles sometimes are very hard especially at the end of the game. It takes some time to manage it and to complete the game but it is very much fun because you'll try so many different things and you will probably fail repeatedly. So it is quite an achievement if you finally manage one of the harder puzzles and realizes how simple the solution really is. My thinking often was TOO complicated and the things I tried were quite extreme but the fun in the game is that you CAN try them. Sometimes there are multiple solutions to a riddle which makes the game even more fun. People often compare this to Portal or Portal 2 and a little bit it feels the same way. Magnetism however is a thing we all know from reality and Portals are not - so there was a difference in the feel of the game for me. The story of the game however is set in the far future and changes later in the game quite a bit so it gets more and more unrealistic and I have to say that the story is not good and not well written at all. It feels like bits and pieces put together. Because of the fact that there are dangers involved later in the game (and you only have you non deadly mag gun) influences the puzzles in the game. There are now time specific action sequences in which you can die - I really hated those and they did not really fit into the game so far. Controls are easy to use and rebindable but remember that you have to edit a ini file if you want to rebind your mouse buttons. If you want to play a really good puzzle game with an easy to use mechanic but with different (but always logical) puzzles and a quite unusual setting then this is your game. Please don't buy this game because you are so interested in the story because this is the weakest part of the game. It is a great puzzler and the devs were really good in using the mechanics to create quite challenging puzzles.