I've been very disappointed by MagRunner: Dark Pulse, the stuff I read about the game made it seemed like it was going to be much like portal and then at some point become scary/creepy/gory in some way shape or form, or involve monsters of some sort. After playing it for a few hours and being stuck at some puzzle at the beginning, I decided that I wasn't ready for what was to follow and didn't enjoy my time at all.
First and foremost, the pacing has a serious issue - at least at the beginning of the game. I can understand trying to weave a story and characters and put some atmosphere in the world, I can understand having elevator sequences to load the next chunk of level, but the way it went - start a puzzle, solve a puzzle, loading screen, little cutscene, loading screen, new puzzle - made me cringe. I wish the puzzles were back to back with cutscenes while you're moving from one to the next, I wish there were no interruption in the puzzle solving sequences because moving to a room, watching a clip and then moving back isn't fun. Portal did story building too and it did loading elevators too, but at least you went for far longer than you do in MagRunner and the story bits were woven into you playing the game, not making you stop and watch them.
Secondly, first person platforming is terrible. Especially if you're jumping on small cubes floating in mid-air and on small platforms without railings. This game works with magnetic fields and moving things by charging elements of the map with your gun that shoots two different polarities. Two blocks of the same colour/magnetic polarity will stick, different blocks will repel themselves. You can make pretty interesting puzzles with that concept but I feel like what I had tried in my time with MG:DP was more physics-based than a true binary puzzle. In one instance, I moved platform with the different polarities to get them across a path, but it really felt like I was doing something that shouldn't work but barely worked because of the way the physics were set up. Did I solve the puzzle? Did I just fumble into a working solution?
And later on, I was completely stuck on something. A puzzle where I couldn't see the way to progress, where the only things I could see were shaky platforming that I failed multiple times, enough to think that this wasn't the right thing to try. The game has no way to help you if you're stuck. The puzzle mechanics are doled quite quickly without much explanation. Something like introducing them slowly and explaining the properties of each new platform/block thing/mechanic would have done wonders. Did I need to stack multiple platforms in some way to stack even more magnetism to repel me? Did I need to jump somewhere? Was the bridge of magnetism useful in any way? Many questions I'll never know, because after fumbling around for a while, I just wanted to stop struggling.
