Portal, the game that unexpectedly stole the thunder from the Orange Box, was a modern day masterpiece of game design. It relied on simple physics puzzles, which you’d solve using the featured Portal Gun, all wrapped around in a very simple art-style. It also features an incredible ‘eye in the sky’-narrator, GLaDoS, that was a pure joy to listen to and follow.. or not follow. With great success comes the usual reaction of having a lot of your ideas and style copied but somehow, never matching the quality of the original. So we ended up with Twin Sector.

Meet Ashley Simms.

Twin Sector is a first-person-puzzle-solver made by Headup Games, a german-based developer without any outstanding previous games. In Twin Sector you play the role of Ashley Simms, a huge-breasted athletic woman that was tucked away in cryo-sleep, dozing off happily, until she was woken up by the resident AI of the facility, OSCAR. Also out of the blue, she has a pair of ‘telekinetic-gloves’ that she can use to push or pull objects or herself if aimed at a wall or ceiling. Noticing any similarities to Portal yet?

A whole 15 families?

The story places you on a secret base made with the specific purpose of resurrecting the human civilization in case of an apocalyptic event. You are part of a host of other humans, the best of the best, you taking the role of a professional athlete/cliffclimber/bungeejumping chick. With huge breasts. Don’t ask me how she manages to do the 100 meter dash with that amount of baggage upfront. Our Ashley also gets a very long speech as she enters the program about how she saved 15 families from certain doom in what appeared to be a suicide mission. We are controlling a real hero here. I’m sorry to be so petty in a review, but i found that to be extremely amusing.

The game focuses entirely on solving puzzles by using your telekinetic gloves. They have the property of being able to attract/repel objects, or if aiming at a solid immovable surface like a wall or a ceiling, they can pull or push our Ashley from and to certain doom.

Twin Sector is putting the drama in overdramatic.

Think of it as the gravity gun from Half Life 2,with just an added feature. The problem is that even the basis of all puzzles, the gloves, are flawed. You can charge the pull/push powers by holding down the right/left mouse buttons. All’s fine and dandy until you realize that by using them, you lose push or pull energy, a full push/pull taking some 70% of the available energy of that power. The only way to recharge that is to just not use the gloves for a couple of seconds. I found that to be very distracting from gameplay, especially since sometimes you need to do consecutive power uses. The fact that even if you have 10% energy, and the game lets you ‘charge to full’, you only get the 10% energy equivalent of the charge, doesn’t really help with the game-flow any.

Also, the puzzles themselves are no better off.

They involve you using objects around you in a sequence to get to where you have to go, and also getting yourself up to where you have to. The thing is that the puzzles are sometimes so brain-meltingly hard, or out of view that you don’t even realize what you should be doing. There were often times where i’d be sitting in a room, not knowing what i was supposed to do, using all the obvious answers, when i finally notice that i was ment to do something entirely different. A good deal of the puzzles have only one solution and only few of them are able to accommodate a more ‘think outside the box’ logic. Add in the fact that some of them also are time-constrained, having to do a sequence of fast moves to go where you have to, and you end up with a lack of willpower to go on. Not to mention that the game does not allow you to save, basing its saves on a very arbitrary and badly made checkpoint system.

The improbable probability of glass shattering that way is outstanding.

There were often times when i’d have to redo 5 minutes of annoying ‘exact’ puzzles, only at the end, right before the checkpoint, to meet a ‘tracker’, a flying drone that kills you in two blows and follows you constantly, and die,  throwing me back at the previous checkpoint. The fact that the gloves are also a tad inexact, you not knowing exactly where you’ll end up sometimes, mixed in with the trackers, time-constrained puzzles and a slew of other non-fun additions makes this one of the most annoying experiences i’ve ever had. And even if you manage to do them, right before you go “YES!”, the game crashes.. it tends to do that.

Now if we dig even deeper, the puzzles themselves have no real reason for their existence. Why would laser fields have big buttons to move them around, why are there dispensers for canisters of flammable liquids and why do you need specific objects to destroy specific doors/windows? To add another fun fact to the whole puzzle-solving, our mega-athlete character can’t even fall a meter before getting damage, and she seems to be incredibly slow-running. Again, this all mixes greatly together to create the most frustrating puzzles ever. All of this could have been forgotten if at least it was an immersive experience with good story and great characters.

Unimpressive fire effects.

Sadly, it’s not. Even from the first cutscene you notice extremely bad voice acting and animations. I know that the developers are german, and they probably gave the english localization to a cheap company, but i would have liked them to make an effort at least. I can’t believe how developers give so little credit to good sound in their game.. i know a few bad small games from indie developers that even though the gameplay was lacking, a good atmosphere and great sound made up for it. Comparing this to Portal again, OSCAR has absolutely nothing on GLaDoS.. it has no personality, no quirks, nothing remarkable about it. Even our character, Ashley, manages to sound like a spoiled Paris Hilton clone. The even sadder thing is.. this is not the worst voice acting i’ve seen in a game.

As previously said, the puzzles fit in the game world like a cube in spheric slot. The level designs are made specifically to be a sequence of puzzles and that’s it. Also, while in Portal you have the Companion Cube, in Twin Sector you have.. a ball of trash. Ironic as it seems, it’s true. The game could have very well been stripped down to 100 or so puzzle-rooms, without a real story or stuttering AI’s. It would have probably been better.

Meet the Companion Trash Ball.

The game doesn’t even look all that great. You can clearly see a lack of any real art design, it being a mix and mash of browns and grays; corridors and vents. It’s surprising that while it’s so easy nowadays to make a game look great, it even fails at that. Flames and particle effects look cheap and bland, the textures work as a purely functional surface and overall, the general look of the game is unimpressive. It’s functional for my standards, but i would have appreciated either going all the way and making it look great, or sticking to a minimalistic  style. They could have done a lot better by just cutting out parts of the game, and restructuring it. Also worth mentioning are the long loading times, given the fact that for example Red Faction Guerrilla can load a game and everything you need in under 5 seconds, i can’t see how Twin Sector needs 20-30 seconds or more to load a game. Overall the gameplay core idea was pretty solid, and if they looked at it under a different light, we’d probably have a better game.

So it’s time for the bottom line. Is this game worthy of your 30 euros? No. Not by a long shot. There are a ton of other games out there cheaper and a lot better, and plus, with October around the corner coming with a ton of great games, it’d be a shame to spend it on a sub-mediocre puzzle solver.