8 Video Game Mechanics Harder Than The Final Boss

8. The Portal Gun - Portal

The Portal games are two of the most ingeniously noodle-baking puzzle-platformers ever made, with players forced to use the Portal Gun - or, er, the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device - in order to progress.

The Portal Gun can generate portals between two spaces, and so players are charged with finding creative ways to fire the gun in order to traverse the game's increasingly tricky test chambers.

This mechanic is the game, basically - a series of physics-based challenges which will require you to use the Portal Gun to manipulate objects in the environment and exploit momentum to fling yourself around like a meaty rocket.

It's brilliant but positively brain-breaking, especially when the game first hit the market back in 2007, where there was simply nothing like it.

But once you've actually gotten to grips with the particulars of using the Portal Gun, the climactic boss battle against rogue AI GLaDOS is pretty much a breeze.

By this point, having spent hours using the Portal Gun in myriad barmy ways, GLaDOS doesn't offer much of a challenge.

You simply need to create portals to fire GLaDOS' own rockets back at her, collect her broken parts as they fall off, and throw them in the incinerator - repeatedly until she finally croaks.

Given some of the utterly headache-inducing portal puzzles throughout the game leading up to this, the final encounter feels, dare one say it, trivial by comparison.