I am going to be very blunt in this review, but do keep in mind this is a passion project from fans who did this all for free.

Portal: Revolution is sadly just not very good. Why?

Portal as a franchise is built upon being funny. Portal 1 was more morbidly funny, whereas portal 2 took a more lighthearted approach. However, the characters in this game barely ever even try to land a joke, and when they do, they fall flat on their face - and this is a symptom of bad writing, I'm afraid.

The whole time the characters talk, I am constantly confused as to how any being could think the way they do. The character that wakes you up, Sterling, mentions that GLaDOS was shut down by a ''monster'' of a human and that he wants to wake her back up because aperture is falling apart without her. You are also human, and Sterling does not seem to have had any other interactions with humans. Why would he possibly trust you?

One of the characters was a human and is now a core. You meet her by basically turning her on for the first time. She is panicked for a moment, asking where her hands are and such. Alright! Interesting concept! Two minutes later, she is completely over it, has forgotten what hands are like, and starts barking orders at you. It's never mentioned after the first 10 minutes of her character how weird it is to be a core. She's just okay with it now, I guess.

As you get through the game and he keeps yapping on about getting to ''the spire'' to revive GLaDOS, you start to notice that everything he says is just ''we are x steps away from objective'' with barely any other information, nuance, context or humor ever to be found. This goes on for quite a while as the game gives you a blue only portal gun for quite a while, then finally gives you a proper portal gun after what feels like 2 hours of rushing through some of the easiest chambers you've ever come across, one of which was a direct rip from portal 1.

And that last part is something this game does a weird amount. It likes to take things from portal 1 and 2 and re-use them. There's a chamber from portal 1 (but now its decrepit ooooh) that plays the same, the game sends you down to old Aperture midway through because portal 2 did so as well, there are multiple lines directly lifted from Wheatley and repurposed by one of the two new characters, and most embarrassingly, they give you a companion cube, make you put them in a teleporter 2 inches away, and then make you burn it. No bonding is attempted. No time is given to get attached. It feels entirely like it was done because it's another thing to mark off the checklist.

There's also a lot of moments where either through characters or environment, small tidbits of lore are revealed. Cool! A lot of it contradicts canon or makes no sense.

There's 3 big ones that really, really pissed me off to hear.:

1. Aperture built the modern portal gun 30 years in the past from when GLaDOS was built.
No??? Why the hell do you think it was still being tested, why do you think it looks exactly like every other glados-era tech? That makes no bloody sense!

2. Old Aperture in this game has a lot of more modern things strewn about it in general. There's sections where it feels like the idea was ''theyre building new stuff through this to repurpose it'' but THERE IS A GIANT SEAL BETWEEN NEW AND OLD APERTURE YOU OPEN AND LEAVE THROUGH IN PORTAL 2.

3. There's a section where a new mechanic is introduced: Pipes that can suck / blow objects only. This is then explained as ''theyre calibrated to only transport things with a mass of 60kg or below''. Why. Why would you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ try to explain this mechanic??? If they had not said anything, I would have been able to keep up my suspension of disbelief and go ''oh cool pipe moves thing''. By trying and failing to explain it with bad physics, you get me thinking about how it works. Have you ever been pushed sideways by 60kg of force? Yeah, you don't stay on your feet. At the most generous, your character should be sucked towards the pipe but not into it. Why try to explain this?!


In general, it feels like the whole game wasn't really tested, ironically enough. I was able to softlock myself twice (though i did so in an attempt to do so, as portal generally has very good softlock protection and little quips if you try to do so). There's a moment one of the characters wants you to catch them falling off their rail, and you can just ignore them. You'll need to pick them up but they never comment about how you didn't catch them, they compliment your teamwork.

There's a lot of situations with confusing or bad visibility on what you should be doing or what pressing a button did, and generally most test chambers arent set up to present you the first piece of the puzzle, leaving you to go around the room and see what buttons to go press.

There's pipes that can only suck objects, and pipes that can suck objects *and* players. There is no visual difference that I could tell.

There's long stretches of walking and doing nothing, moments that feel like they are made to waste your time. One of the puzzles has you fling yourself to a 3 story staircase you have to walk up. Why would you not design this to fling you all the way up? What fun is there in walking up the staircase?

Why is the final boss battle REPEATING THE SAME CHAMBER 3 TIMES WITH A NEW SEGMENT ADDED?!

If I replayed the game, which I really dont want to do, I'm sure I could go on, but this was not a good experience. I highly recommend anyone who wants a good portal mod plays Portal Stories: Mel.

That's not to say I dont respect the attempt. There's still good ideas strewn about, and one of the chambers was actually fun and stumped me. There was also a different type of laser cube that I feel could have done with some more challenging chambers. It just feels very underbaked, and the writing, pacing and difficulty have me not enjoying my time with it.