Inspired by Valve’s Portal, Portaball is a top-down maze based puzzle game in which you use portals to transport a small ball to the finishing square. Portals can only be created on walls that have a soft grey line on one of their sides and therein lies the challenge of the game; to find the optimal route through the maze.

The game puts a greater emphasis on reflexes than it does on puzzle-solving; this is confirmed in the various obstacles found within, such as gates that illuminate the other half of the board when passed through, or arrows that speed up the ball itself. Often, you’ll know exactly what the solution is but you may find it difficult as some levels don’t allow a large margin of error.

The controls don’t help in this regard either; portals are generated relatively slowly to the pace of the game, with a single tap bringing up a blue portal and a double-tap bringing up a white one. Yes, tapping or double-tapping a fresh square moves the portal location, but even then you may find yourself frustrated at times with the time it takes to respond.

Portaball comes with 50 levels, plus a challenge mode. There are two types of challenge; one in which the game doesn’t distinguish between a blue and a white portal (instead it colours both blue), and one in which it only allows you to pause the game once. Both of these seem designed to pad out the game’s content as an afterthought and offer no real extra challenge. Substituting these for a random level generator that would challenge you to see how many consecutive levels you could beat would be a great addition.

The game is unfortunately very linear, although you can skip a level if you are really stuck; with the way the game is designed it doesn’t lend itself very well to multiple completions. It’s not the sort of gameplay that lends itself very well to online scoring either, but some achievements would have been nice.

Happily, Portaball is pleasant enough to look at, with the overall presentation being very strong indeed especially from a one-man studio. But, the presentation feels incomplete because the game has no sound effects or music; sound always provides a better experience, when done well, than a game that’s been muted.

Without said sound, Portaball is a little lacking; it also needs a couple of tweaks to the level arrangement too which feels a little random to use. At 59p it’s a great first effort but just needs some more work to get it where it should be.

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