Portal: Project-Beta

Portal: Project-Beta

25/70 – general

20/20 – story+

5/10 – advanced

50 of 100 total

This modification is a “full” upgrade to Portal.  It includes color correction, reflective textures, new portal gun and character model all in addition to new maps.

Gameplay:  The first few maps are simply updated and slightly modified renditions of the original maps.  Once you get into the new maps you will see varied levels of difficulty.  They do not seem to go in any specific order of difficulty, some are easy while some are close to impossible.

Portal: Project-Beta includes life force detectors, kill plates [large electrified panels] and one other addition.  The other addition is that they give certain objects “negative” gravity.  Certain objects such as weighted cubes will fall up and activate buttons on the ceiling.

I will say that the mod is very pretty [not as pretty as projex] with proper shading, a plugin for color correction and new models but the scripting and mapping let me down.  You can trap yourself in a few levels and some script triggers seem to be tripped before the proper point in the chamber.

Story:  You start out with blue portals only and it is very similar to the base story line.  You receive the orange portal upgrade after a few chambers.  Then there is a brief companion cube segment.  The major difference from the original story is that the story ends when Glados attempts to kill you and while there is no boss battle, there are two possible endings.

Difficulty:  You will be required to use the trick to throw a delayed portal by goosing a portal as well as using momentum in excess.  Bring everything in your arsenal and take breaks if you get frustrated.  Everything is doable with enough time put into it.  The difficulty is in the execution here.  Though the difficult chambers are rather hard the moderate chambers are rewarding and entertaining so do not be over-discouraged.

Advanced chambers?:   Yes, just complete the game without sv_cheats or load up the maps by typing “map [mapname]” into console.  They also added their textures and models to another moders map pack and included that in their extra files under caboose jr.

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