After playing the game through to completion, I can tell you right now that this is not worth your time. The paint gun makes puzzles FAR too easy, especially when they begin recycling levels from portal 2 itself. The voice actor I'm sure tried his best, but it was not good, I'm sorry, making the personality core sound like a shoddily modded dimwit. Also, the core is never actually used as a core. It could have remained unrevealed for the entire game and it would have felt no different.

Gameplaywise, I spent a considerable amount of time shouting at the gun's physics. Some levels require you to move quickly spraying gel in front of you, but the physics-based gel BARELY MOVES FASTER THAN YOU DO - as a result, you have to KNOW something is there and spray it long before reaching it or the gel won't register as it lands at the same time you hit. Fail to know, and the level - there's one specific level I'm griping about - becomes a chore where you have to memorize every single thing and prepare for it long in advance - before you can even SEE it.
Other than that, the gel idea just felt too lazy. The whole game felt too lazy. I have seen more effort put into many workshop maps on portal 2 itself.

Would I complain normally? No. But this mod actually has the gall to CHARGE MONEY. And when so many mods are out there that are FREE for Half Life 2, Portal, so on so forth - hell, the entire GAME of team fortress 2 being free, this mod is NOT worth any money, period. It is unpolished, buggy, feels VERY lazy the entire way through, and has a terrible ending that leaves you thinking "That's it?". It tries many times to crack jokes also in relation to the Cave Johnson style in Portal 2, but the bad voice actor coupled with terrible, very obviously poorly scripted dialogue makes it simply an annoyance.

Now, on the other hand, the music is fantastic. A++. Someone give the composers an award. It's one of the only reasons the mod remains playable with all it's issues, lame recycled art style, lame concept, bad dialogue, bad voice actor, bad physics reliance, etc. The music was beyond fantastic and I hope they release it for purchase or download or something.

I was also very impressed with the audio system that utilized speakers to send out music, which rather than simply having some strange background music playing in a game gave a bit more of a sense of immersion, as you know the core is playing the music and that it was intended as part of the level, while also giving the developers a chance to toy with the music using dialogue from the core too.

The only other thing that impressed me was a single plot twist, but personally, I do not find it enough to justify paying for this when so many games that are entirely free can out-match it on all levels.

All in all? DO NOT SPEND MONEY ON THIS. If they ever make it free, which they won't because they're probably getting a ton of cash right about now and don't frankly care, then it is worth it as an above-average mod. As a paid mod, which I can consider a full game? What else can I get for this price...

Well, you wait for a steam sale and literally every single game is as much or less than this mod...
The entirety of the tomb raider franchise is available, with each game costing the same or barely more than this mod...
Civilization 3 is cheaper, along with Binding of Issac, Plants vs Zombies, Half Life: Blue Shift...POSTAL...Half Life Opposing Force...Any of the sonic the hedgehog games (classic ones, which are great)... I'm just running through the list of games under $5 right now and finding ones I know are good. This mod at full price is $7.

DO. NOT. BUY. IT. As mentioned, if it's FREE, it's worth your time. If it's PAID, spend your money elsewhere. Do not support this new "money for mods" deal, because you know others will follow suit if this takes off.

Let's try to keep this short.

The game is based on Tag: The Power of Paint. It was a first-person puzzle game developed by a group of students from DigiPen that revolved around traversing a city using a paint gun to change the properties of the surfaces you sprayed. Valve noticed the team and put them to work on Portal 2. The people who have developed Aperture Tag are not the same as those who originally developed Tag. It becomes apparent very very quickly.

In Portal 2, you are seamlessly introduced new game mechanics to work with, in a safe environment. In Aperture Tag, you can die in essentially every level while it’s missing the subtleties that Portal enrolled to keep the player on track. Information is missing where there should be some.

As for story, there isn’t much. There is a voice actor which is appreciated. They throw in some lore here and there. Though there is no sense of atmosphere. It feels like random bits of Aperture brought together in a non-cohesive manner. A lot of the parts are there, just not pieced together properly.

To end on a lighter note, there are some good elements. There is an escape sequence which despite the number of deaths and shotty gel mechanics in motion, is a fun sprint. The other thing worth acknowledging is how it is rather polished. While I didn’t try my hardest to break any of the levels, they all function as intended and have a clean finish. Plus it did last between 2-3 hours which isn’t too bad.

Regardless, in the end, I cannot recommend it. While it’s price tag is fair, it is missing a lot of the nuances that made Portal 2 and Tag: The Power of Paint great. So just go play the original again.

I played this for a few hours and it's buggy, incomplete, most of the puzzles require actually doing the objectives, you can typically just blue gel off a couple ledges and bounce yourself to the end. The main voice is identical to how it sounds in the second video if you want a preview; it doesn't really feel like I'm even in anything related to Aperture Science at all as far as aesthetic goes. You can download the same number of hours in content for essentially the same thing playing a wide number of the PeTI maps that over-use gel, especially any ones made in Hammer. Because of that, this really isn't worth the money. If you don't mess around and just do the puzzles, I imagine it's maybe 6 hours of gameplay. At $6.99 you're paying more than a dollar per hour of content.

Deal breakers
-Voice acting
-Writing/story & lack thereof
-Tests aren't blue-gel shortcut proofed
-Fizzler doesn't always disable your gel gun, which causes serious game-breaking issues
-More than an hour of hand-holding for puzzles, including portions where the VA gives you a turn-by-turn, literally, on one of the levels

Deal makers
-The map design is thoughtful: there are a few, albeit non-interactable, ratman lairs and such
-A good couple handfuls of the tests can't be bypassed completely with just blue gel, as far as I've playtested
-You can get like $1.00 back selling the Steam trading cards, while this is new, at least

I wouldn't complain about this mod if it were free, but charging for it doesn't make sense. It's significantly lower quality than a lot of free mods (Time Machine and Mel for example) and feels uninspired like the creators weren't actually into Portal as a series. The more difficult puzzles, as other reviewers have said, are based more on fake difficulty like requiring timing or luck over actually figuring out complicated solutions.

To put it simply, it's good, but not worth selling. Got tired of it fast even though I didn't pay for it myself.

How disappointing.

At first I was really looking forward to this game as I enjoyed both Portal games a lot and coop in Portal 2 was great. The price is quite high for such a short game (and a mod at that) but I really thought it would be worth it. Oh how wrong I was.

I played just under three hours now, the first 30 minutes I spent adjusting the settings (who the ♥♥♥♥ uses a default resolution this low? - ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up all my windows) and trying to play coop. The almost complete absence of coop maps was a pretty big letdown, the two maps that were working were awfully short. Also the host using the portal gun was somehow missing his weapon, I as player two was shown using the paint gun.

After that I decided to give the single-player campaign a try. The graphics are somewhat mediocre, not terribly bad but far from excellent (those fugly turrets, seriously).
Don't get me started on the voice acting. The original Portal games featured _amazing_ voice acting, some of the funniest ♥♥♥♥ I've ever heard in a video game. And then there's this crap. Some dude with a speech impediment trying to emulate GLaDOS and failing miserably. After roughly the third or fourth test chamber I seriously considered muting the game because it sucked so bad.
Gameplay. Well. I think the basic idea is pretty good as I quite enjoyed the chapters using gels in Portal 2 and most of the puzzles were quite enjoyable but ♥♥♥♥ that jumping. I HATE jumping puzzles in FPS games and for example in chamber 3 there's a rather small margin of error and I died quite a few times over the course of the game.
In my opinion the puzzles were somewhat unique although, having played through Portal 2 two or three times, a lot of elements were familiar and as such not terribly difficult.
Which brings me to my next complaint. It's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ short. Not even close to the five or six hours mentioned elsewhere, two and a half at most. The story has little replayability and there's no multi-player content so that's it. Three hours, five bucks. Killing Floor is five bucks (on sale) and I have nearly 700 hours played there, just for comparison.
Also the end. Seriously guys. You think that's a proper ending? I won't post any spoilers here but I will say it's pathetic.

Bottom line: do not buy. At least not at this time, with an official coop campaign included it may be worth it.

TL;DR: Solid mod, buy on sale only, if you want more or want to play it when it's full price then just go play Tag.

Ah, Aperture Tag. The black sheep of Portal mods, if for no reason other than the price attached to it. A mod that costs money - this must be a phenomenal, top-of-the-line mod, right?

...no.

As with my old-as-hell Portal Stories: Mel review, I'm going to start off with the plot.

This game presumably takes place after the events of Portal 2 (all the old chambers are retrofitted with components to aid the paint gun) but to some point where GLaDOS is either spontaneously dead again or just doesn't care about tests outside of the Cooperative Testing Initiative... yet the Human Vault is open still? Ok, sure, whatever, I can handwave something relatively minor like that. You're the first (unnamed) test subject for a testing core named Nigel, and you're participating in the Handheld Gel Testing Initiative. Simple enough, right?

Somehow, they _still_ manage to trip and fall.

!!!Spoilers for the plot beyond here. Skip ahead if you care.

The core of my issues with it stem from Nigel. Seeing as he is the core administrating the test, he's all we interact with for the duration of the campaign. For much of the game, his writing comes off as a less funny GLaDOS crossed with the announcer voice lines and none of the deadpan delivery that made these two work, sometimes even outright ripping off a good amount of the jokes (a lot of the 'fill out the appropriate paperwork after the test' setups and punchlines). He's at his best when not trying to be something else, which unfortunately isn't too much of the game.

The main bone I have to pick with him is regarding how his portrayal in the context of the lore of Portal actually makes him less interesting. One of the 'core' points about the cores is the more human sounding the voice, the more human (and less cold/robotic) the personality and character (think Wheatley, or GLaDOS in Portal 1 vs. the end of Portal 2). Nigel's voice is pretty much unfiltered, which you'd think would mean he's the most human character going in this version of Aperture.

He. Never. Deviates. From. Protocol.

Even though he clearly cares some amount for you and for doing a good job in his testing duties (congratulating you after finishing the testing-required message), he still rigidly adheres to protocol, such as berating you at the end of some tests (I believe the main example is the second chamber of chapter 4, which involves scrutinizing you for taking too long trying to solve; however, I could be wrong about the specific chamber). Not once does he break from the script - the alternate ending (if you take the secret path in the final chamber and hit the button first before proceeding) leads to him sending you no closer to the surface. Given that he should be (on paper) the most empathetic core around, you'd think he'd prioritize your wellbeing at least once, but nope. This makes for a rather large disconnect between how he's presented in the context of Portal's established storytelling and what we actually get - a boring, disembodied-for-most-of-the-game voice that spends most of its time cracking bad jokes.

!!!End of spoilers for story.

Now, as for the level design... it's decent. Levels never feel mezzanine; it's just as clear to spot important areas and objectives as the base game. Due to the fact you can now put gel on the majority of surfaces, it should be no surprise that there are a lot of alternative solutions to each puzzle - and this is where the fun is, finding these shortcuts and shaving as many seconds as possible. It never feels like it's pushing it too difficult (which is unfortunate, seeing as there's no additional content past the campaign - but I'll get to that), but some of the solutions felt reasonably clever (for instance, the puzzle in Chapter 4 requiring you to shuffle a laser and 3 cubes) and the possibility of most given solutions being cheese solutions still manage to make you feel smart. However, the lack of difficulty means that it clocks in at only a few hours on a first go - and even less for subsequent playthroughs. Furthermore, where the early tests are about navigating an environment, the later tests are slow as molasses, involving sitting in excursion funnels, lethargic setups, etc. The OST names also seems to suggest that some more interesting movement chambers ended up on the cutting room floor, which is unfortunate.

!!!Spoilers past here.

The most fun part of the game is the end of Chapter 3: the ALSSER escape, in which you shut down an (ultimately fake and meaningless) reactor through a tight 50-second escape sequence. It's fun! It requires you to think on your feet and just _go._ It takes full advantage of both mobility gels very well and is still incredibly satisfying to play through each time because the challenge isn't cerebral - it's about parsing and navigating an environment as fast as possible under a serious time crunch. And save for 3 or 4 other tests across a 27-map campaign, it's the only time you get to move fast.

Also, the game doesn't have a bossfight. Period. It seems to me like we could have slipped a Nigel fight in after he realizes you closed the pit of fire - maybe he could snap at you for ruining what was supposed to be a perfect first test? Maybe the empathy suppressor (which is canonically a thing, according to the turrets investment opportunity trailer) in Nigel finally kicks into overdrive and tries to make him kill you, forcing you to reach him and deactivate it bit by bit? There's a lot of ways you could take that, and I came up with those two (trying to stay consistent with what little of Nigel's character we got) in a few minutes. This is also the thing the OST song title was alluding to - the final track on it by Harry101UK (#24, Confrontation) implies there was supposed to be a boss fight, but it simply got scrapped.

!!!End of spoilers for level design.

The soundtrack is phenomenal, not much to say here. Anything Harry101UK touches turns to gold, and this OST is no exception. Some of my favorites include tracks 18 (Boots), 3 (Keep it to Yourself), and 21 (Certifiably Insane), and many more that would be too long here (which, coincidentally, includes pretty much the entire soundtrack). Additionally, All These Walls is a great song to end the mod with, complete with some symbolism in how Aperture (something that can already be drawn as an allegory for capitalism, throwing caution and ethics to the wind in the name of money) traps those within.

Now, you might be saying: why am I so harsh on Aperture Tag? It's just a mod, of course the quality isn't to the same level as the base game!

Of course, the issue is the price tag.

I'd recommend this mod as a fun diversion (because it is) and an interesting spin on many of the elements used in the base game (again, because it is), but I simply can't because it costs as much on sale as Portal 1. Even on sale, it still costs more than Rexaura, Portal Stories: Mel, Thinking with Time Machine, etc., but doesn't hit that higher level of quality or amount of content as those other mods. The puzzles are too easy to slow down the pace of the game (even on a first go) and it lacks the additional modes like time attack and such from the base game. The only source of replayability is the workshop. Granted, these are a bunch of fun to play through (because they actually take full advantage of the mechanics on display here), but it's still lacking compared to other mods (that are also free, to boot).

If the idea of coating things in gels sounds up your alley, I'd recommend the original game that both Portal 2 and Aperture Tag draw inspiration from: Tag: Thee Power of Paint[arcade.digipen.edu].

I remember when I first played Portal 2. It was the christmas of 2011, when I got myself the Portal bundle for just 5€, and that opened my eyes: the perfect game. I loved every second of it. So when I first heard of this mod, I was pretty excited: portal 2, but with a new story and a new gameplay. That could work. But it didn't. Let's see why.

This game started to bother me even before I pressed the "play" button: 5€ for a mod? A MOD? Not a standalone title? I mean, you need Portal 2 to play it, so its clearly a mod. And its into the Portal universe, so its a mod. But 5€. Oh well, some people spent time on it, so I guess its kinda fair. But that was me talking before I finished this game.

As soon as I started, the first thing I notice are the well done animations. Some of them looks very good, and are completely new and not recycled from the Portal 2 game. But that's only for the first 20 minutes of the game, after that they just went "screw this" and started using models and stuff from the game.
The new models goes to "meh" to "is this Ricochet". The vending machine had the worst texture I've ever seen, and I was running this game on High settings. Why did I said the vending machine? We'll see later.

Same goes for the model of the Paint gun. It looks like some kid game you can get at BIG BUY for 5 dollars, all plasticky and with some gel in it that looks so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fake. Also, do you remember how was holding a Portal gun? When it shooted portals? How the animations tricked you thinking that you were in the game, shooting these portals? Well, this game can fail this task too by giving no shooting animations whatsoever to this terrible Paint gun, making it look like a DOS game from the early 90s. But that was the 90s. This is frikin' 2014.

In Portal 2 to solve a puzzle or kill a turret you had to think, to make a strategy. To use your brain. Here to kill down a turret its like a shooter: aim and boom, just shoot some blue gel at it and watch it bounce. Really had to use my brain there.

The puzzles are way too easy. Most of them doesn't even take too much time to solve, all the times goes to repeat the same thing over and over until you get to the platform you want because MOVING YOUR CHARACTER AROUND WITH THIS GEL ITS FRIKIN' IMPOSSIBLE. There was not a single moment in the game where I felt like I was controlling the character properly. She was just bouncing around and then straight into the water. Reload from the last checkpoint and start again. Terrific.

A little talk about the new turrets: they look.. terrible. I know they wanted to make them look like a 50s version of the turret, but those are just 2 pieces of metal with a tommy gun on it. They're so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ugly and useless. But at least I give them credit for trying.

The story is probably the worst part. You wake up in the same way of Chell in Portal 2 (kind of) and you get yourself the Paint gun pretty soon. You don't know whats going on for most of the time. Just solve some test, and then keep going. Until you find yourself at the end, where you have to solve the last test to get some Orange juice (some rip-off of the cake from Portal 1) that they mention.. what? 2 times maybe? In portal 1 they mention the cake pretty much each room. In the end you really wanted that cake, even if you weren't hungry. They build some repetitive propaganda that made you want that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cake. Here they just mention this orange cola 2 or 3 times maybe. Oh yea, you're at the end, now you're gonna get it. I don't even care.
There's no narrative whatsoever. Everything its just random. No one or nothing explain to you what's
going on. Chapter 1 its boring and slow. Chapter 2 starts pretty fun, but then gets repetitive very soon, Chapter 3 its the same as chapter 2, without the final zone, the time trial puzzle. I swear it, if the game was gonna end it with that, I whould have feel accompliced. Really. But no, chapter 4, some rip-off of the Thruman show, with fake ambient zone. Relatively useless. Same goes for the 2 finals. Unsatisfactory as hell.

They also keep throwing at your face stages from Portal 2 like "hey, do you remember this part of Portal 2? It was really fun. Now watch that for the next couple of minute while you're being sucked into a tube that its leading to the next stage really slowly with no dialogue."
Yes, I know I'm playing a Portal game, I am Portal fan, I KNOW. THAT'S WHY I'M PLAYING THIS GAME. THANKS.

Another thing about Portal 2 was the speed and the fluency. Sure, you had to stop for a while into a test chamber, thinking your way out of it, but once you where done, you just had to take an elevator and get to another chamber. Here the pipe its sooo slooow and sometimes you have to do some bullcrap to get to the next test that its just boring. It only has one fast moment, that of course is the speed map. That was probably the only fun and memorable part of the game. The 50 second map. In a 3 hours game.

The characters, if we can call them that way, are blank. The protagonist, some retextured version of Chell with a mason-suit, has no personality. No backstory. No-nothing. She's just there.
Same goes for the Core, Nigel, if I remember it right. Yea, because they didn't bother to let you know the name of it until the end. He was probably one of the things that made me rage into the entire gameplay. He tried so bad to be the english funny guy from Portal 2, but he just fails. His voice is poor, the characterization is non-existent, his humor is terrible. Seriously, do you remember one of the main characteristics of Portal 2? The humor. It had so many funny moments with GLaDOS or Wheatley, and so many funny lines that wanted you to replay the game over and over just to see if you missed one. This guy, Nigel, doesn't work. He try way too hard to be kind, or try way too bad to be gentle. You don't really understand what the hell he's doing for the entire game. AND WHY THE HELL IS HE SHOWN IN RANDOM PLACES DURING THE COURSE OF THE GAME? Apparently they didn't have time to explain that, 'cause they never explain that to you.
And one last thing about Nigel's model. He's a Core, right, and what makes Cores different from each other? The color and shape of the eye. So what did they do? They took the Space Core, made the color a little bit more light orange and give it no expressions. I don't even have to add anything to this description.

I'll be quick on the gameplay section because this review is getting way too long. As already established, the character is really hard to control. So what can be even worst than this? Sometimes wall bounce doesn't seem to work. Great.
But heres a good thing after all this text of pure rage and delusion: they added some new gameplay mechanic, like red laser walls that will instantly kill you. That's good, but they had to screw it up. Because how did I find out that they would kill me? Walking right into it and get killed. You know, a little flying text that would say "hey, don't walk into that, or that will kill you!" would have been helpful. Instead we get the same message "press ctrl to stop bouncing" all the time whenever we bounce 2 or more times in a row on the blue gel. THANKS I ALREADY KNOW THAT SINCE ITS SOMETHING FROM PORTAL 2.

And after all this.. review, the only good thing I really liked from the game. The soundtrack is amazing and well stylized with the Portal universe, I will totally listen to that in the future. And also, the idea of a giant speaker during the puzzles is a very good one. Until you run into them and you get your ears blown away by the loud music.

Final Score: 2/10

It's intended for Portal fans. I'm a Portal fan, and I hate it. It's not even worth 2 cents, and it's totally not worth 5€. If the dev had so much time and knowledge of the source engine, they could have made a new different game, that whould have been way better than this garbage.

I went into this game optimistically, since community made Portal games such as Portal Stories: Mel left me with a sense of satisfaction, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. With Aperture Tag, though, this was not the case at all. The paint gun mechanic, while a very interesting idea, was not successfully delivered. Unlike the gradual introduction to new mechanics in the original Portal games, the introduction to the capabilities of the paint gun was rushed, and often left a feeling of confusion. If you need to add a skip button for timed parkour courses, chances are you did not correctly provide your player with the tools to complete the course in the first place. The level designs were sloppy, especially in the lower Old Aperture style levels where I was immediately met with elements that did not belong in that era such as lazers and light bridges, and I often found myself stuck using routes that seemed like they were not intended to be used at all. I even found myself moving across pipes right at the bottom of the chamber, or along the very edge of panelled walls, which would not be possible if the level had been composed correctly. Some puzzle elements were barely needed, and cluttered the tests. Honestly, I'm glad I got this game when it was on sale. It should have been free. The only fun thing I can find about this game is the increased mobility that portals could not provide. I adore momentum based tests, so that was a plus.

It's an insult to charge money for this mod, when larger, infinitely better mods (Portal Stories: Mel) are available for free. Further more, I found this mod frustrating more than anything else. On the last puzzle I tried I had to try a jump about 30 times before finally making it. I've played about a hundred different community levels for Portal 2, so I know my way around the game. When a puzzle is so finely tuned to doing an action within a few milliseconds in order to succeed, I find it more frustrating than fun. This mod was just frustration upon frustration, without a single element of actual fun. It's definitely not worth the money, and it became the first game I've actually requested a refund for.

Now I'll be honest here: I liked this mod. I liked the idea of firing gel wherever I wanted and being able to bounce around and run like the wind at the press of a button. But almost immediately I was taken away from the experience by a plethora of issues. The lazy voice acting, horrible scripting, and general lack of what makes the Portal games amazing were a very quick turn off. More upsetting was the fact that there was no way to use water or erase any of your gels. The best you can do is cover them up with each other, but being able to clean surfaces would make the game far less frustrating. To top everything off, just a few levels from the ending, I find myself unable to progress in any way except to restart the chapter. There are visible saves but no way to access them, and being that the level design was done incorrectly and the player is able to reach autosave checkpoints far before they're supposed to, I am trapped on a platform with no way back to the beginning of the test chamber and no possible way to jump back. Try to reload from the begining of the test but the game will only allow you to start from the last save or from the start of a chapter.

In addition, at some points in the game you are expected to fire orange gel right in front of you as you run to keep your momentum. But half the time, the gel fails to land before you do and all of your momentum is lost, often resulting in death. One section in particular forces you to race against a clock while trying to use this broken mechanic, and more than half of the twenty or so times I attempted this, I was unable to clear small gaps because the gel failed to register in time.

Don't spend your money on this. You're better than that.