Magrunner: Dark Pulse

Developer: Frogwares

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive

UK Price: £14.99

US Price: $19.99

Magrunner borrows so much from Portal it's a cake and a computer short of being a sequel. Conceptually, structurally, even aesthetically similarities between Valve's masterpiece and Frogwares' newest title abound, from the test-chambers that start off sparkly and new and become gradually more run down, to the way it sandwiches snippets of storytelling between the increasingly complex series of puzzles it requires you to solve.

In a way it's both a clever and brave move. There's plenty of room for another game like Portal, but nothing to fill that gap, and Frogwares ran the risk of seriously embarrassing themselves riding so tightly on the back of Valve. Fortunately, Magrunner is a robustly built if not exactly sharply refined doppelganger, and puts just enough of its own spin on the first-person puzzler to make it stand up on its own.
Magrunner places you in the fall-proof shoes of Dax Ward, a young technical savant with that awful almost-but-not-quite shaved haircut that is so popular amongst male videogame protagonists these days, who has been enlisted in the Magrunner program. This is a three-month series of mental and physical challenges designed by a world-controlling corporation to find candidates suitable for dangerous space exploration missions intended to search for new forms of energy. 
The world is not particularly original, but the back-story is surprisingly meaty given the game essentially boils down to moving blocks and platforms around to solve spatial conundrums. Meanwhile, the characters you interact with (mostly via hologram) throughout these trials vary substantially in their quality. By far the strongest is your adoptive father and mutant mentor Gamaji, who is cast perfectly and whose vocal delivery is excellent. The others are fairly stock, with the exception of the news reporter Cassandra who somehow manages to develop a weirdly intimate relationship with Dax over a period of eight hours via hologram. Then again, once you've been through what they go through, perhaps human bonds are a little easier to form.
The Magrunner program takes place in a vast complex of test-chambers, and the first twenty-four hours is broadcast to the world. Everything is going swimmingly, until suddenly Cthulhu joins the party, drinks all the booze and throws up all over the universe. The combination of cyberpunk world-building with Lovecraftian horror may seem a little like mixing strawberries with stilton, but the developers pull it off surprisingly well. Frogwares certainly do a decent Cthulhu, although their portrayal of insanity is ridiculously pantomime. Moreover, while the blend is largely successful, there's a nagging feeling that the game would have been better off inventing its own sci-fi horror rather than borrowing one.
That failure to innovate in terms of world-building is also represented in the art style. The initial test-chambers are beautiful creations, all vibrant colours, clean lines and smooth curves. Visually they're even more inventive than Portal's, and demonstrate that Unreal Engine 3 can still kick out some mighty pretty environments seven years on from its release. Post-Cthulhu, however, you descend into what seems to be an older, more run down area of the complex. This gradual degradation of your surroundings is logical, but not very interesting. Running through an environment of brown metal and grey concrete is the number one cause of narcolepsy in games journalists, and by its midpoint Magrunner was causing more than a few nods of the head.

While the art style falls into drudgery fairly early on, the puzzles themselves remain engaging throughout. Dax is equipped with a glove which enables him to reverse the magnetic polarity of certain objects within the world, with the polarity represented by red and green lights that appear on the objects in question. The in-game magnetism actually works in the opposite way to how real-world magnetism works, with identical colours attracting each other and opposing colours repelling one another, but for the sake of solving logic puzzles, matching colours together makes more sense. A simple puzzle might require you to mantle an obstacle which is higher than you can reach, so you place two cubes on top of one another, stand on top and give them opposing polarities. This will send you shooting upwards, enabling you to jump over the obstacle. 
The number of objects you can use the mag-glove on is limited, but the game uses them in impressively inventive ways. The puzzles take a particularly large leap in ingenuity once you get access to Newton, a magnetic object which you can place almost anywhere in the world, shaped like your pet robot dog. So if you come across a magnetic platform with no obvious way of lifting it, placing Newton on the floor with an opposing polarity will push the platform up, whereas placing him on the wall above the platform with a matching polarity will drag the platform up. 
The difficulty rises fairly steadily, with some truly vast puzzle rooms cropping up in the latter half of the game. Unfortunately, a fair chunk of this added difficulty emerges from the puzzles being more fiddly rather than requiring more logical deliberation. Any puzzle that requires a timed jump is guaranteed to be a right pain, and those which include platforms that travel in a ring or manoeuvring multiple platforms at once has a good chance of inducing some moderate cursing.

But Magrunner's central issue is, and was always going to be, that it takes two unoriginal ideas and merges them together instead of coming up with something entirely of its own. The result of this conceptual collision is certainly enjoyable, but it needs to be flawlessly executed to match up with its unique source material, and although Magrunner weaves these wildly opposing ideas together well, the result is nevertheless just a little bit B-movie.