Review by: Brian Rowe

You have to play a bad game once in a while to better appreciate the great ones. Case in point: Twin Sector, which single-handedly elevates Portal to even further heights of eminence. It’s a poignant comparison, as Twin Sector makes little effort to mask its inspirations. Ashley Simms wakes from cryo-sleep in a subterranean facility at the behest of the overseeing A.I., Oscar. Ashley must solve a gauntlet of environmental puzzles to reach the bowels of the compound and save her still-sleeping comrades from a security system gone berserk.

Mixing Portal with a dose of Half-life 2, one of Ashley’s telekinetic gloves has the power to attract and levitate objects while the other glove repels. It is a solid premise for a physics-based puzzler, but only when the laws of nature work accordingly. There are numerous times you need to pull an object from a floor below or across a divide. Whether the object dutifully moves to float in front of your hand, or smashes you in the face before toppling back down, is a crapshoot. The gloves can also push or pull Ashley in relation to immovable surfaces, and erroneously, movable objects as well. Suffice to say that this can have devastating consequences.

Level-design is not Twin Sector’s strong suit. Push a button to open a grate on the ceiling and cylinders of flammable gas tumble out. I’m not an engineer, but I’m quite certain that that is a bad idea. So are doorways ten feet off the ground, five-story maintenance shafts without ladders, and the plethora of keycards that have so carelessly been left on the floors of locked rooms. Portal was able to get away with some outrageous environments, because it took place in an experimental laboratory. Twin Sector has no such excuse. A few stretches of surrealism for the sake of gameplay are acceptable, but Twin Sector’s liberal abuse is constantly distracting and often infuriating.

There are a handful of decent puzzles, usually involving lasers and avoiding them, but the majority is step-by-step routines, even if you don’t yet know the purpose of your action. If you see a button, push it. If there’s a pane of glass, break it. If a door is cracked, use a gas cylinder to blow it up. The hardest parts of Twin Sector are the results of anomalous physics, scouring ceilings for wayward buttons, and dealing with assorted inconsistencies. For example: Oscar makes it crystal clear on multiple occasions that the gloves do not work underwater, and yet, one puzzle requires you to haphazardly discover that they can be used when wet, albeit in extremely limited form.

DnS Development is mostly known for porting games from PC to Mac and creating software for 3D effects. Twin Sector is the company’s first full game. I appreciate that it made the effort to include full voice-acting throughout and… that’s about all. The premise of telekinetic gloves is solid, but without the physics and level-design to support it, Twin Sector is a b-game Portal knockoff.