"The Enrichment Center is required to remind you that you will be baked, and then there will be cake."Just one of the funny quotes from probably the most demented game of the year.

Portal is included in the package of Valve's The Orange Box. The package includes Half Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. Portal runs off the same engine as Half Life 2, in fact some might consider it a mod to Half Life 2 to put it simply.

But Portal is not your every day shooter; it's something out of the ordinary. The concept of the game may seem like an easy one, but the game consists of much more than shooting two portals to get from one point to another.

The concept of using portals in a game, and simulating real life physics is definitely what we don't see today in all these generic garbage first-person shooters. The idea is fresh and unique, what we need to escape from the repetitive world war shooters.

If you are unfamiliar with Portal, it's a game where have to use your portal gun to complete various tasks and puzzles to progress to the next stage. The puzzles which are set require a lot of thinking to be done, and are very complex. The difficulties increases, as you progress through the game.

Some stages may require interaction with objects, such as a cube called "Weighted Companion Cube". The cube may be used to hold down buttons which activate doors or to help you get pasts platforms which are too large to jump on your own.

An intelligent element in the game which I found, was using your momentum from jumping to portal to portal, to rocket yourself past large platforms. As you can see the game goes far deeper into the elements of portals, and consists of much more of these ingenious elements as you progress.

You may be surprised, but this game does have a story, and is slightly interesting. The player controls the main protagonist of the game, Chell a female, and is instructed by another character called GLaDOS. Chell finds herself waking up contained in a small cell, and is then given instructions by GLaDOS a voice she hears to help her progress. Not much more can be said without spoiling it, but towards the end of the games the story kicks in, and the game starts to get interesting.

Graphically the game shows nothing new, as everything is mostly borrowed from Half Life 2. But still the textures do look amazing, even if they're 2D-looking close-up. You have all these small details, like crowbar textures, chair textures, monitor screens and even some hand written messages on the walls, which make the game feel a whole lot more real and lively.

There's nothing much to say about the audio. There aren’t many sounds, except for the voice acting. I think they done a really amazing job with the voice acting. For GLaDOS the instructor, they hired an opera singer to do the voice. The voice acting the actor performs for the game added a whole lot to the demented feel that the game had going.

Portal is a 4-5 hour game, but is still definitely worth it. It does give you some bonus stages after you complete it, which adds a lot to the replay value. There are also some cheats which you can play around with, that make the game a whole lot more fun, but I'd recommend using them after completion, as it'll make the game much too easy and you'll end up completing the game in less than half the time you'd originally spend, thus wasting your money.

I really enjoyed the game, and is possibly one of the best FPSs of the year, making me want a whole lot more portals.

"Now you are thinking with portals."