Portal 2 Review

PROS

• Incredible Single Player and Co-op Campaigns
• Some of the Best Writing Ever in a Video Game
• Puzzles That Will Bend Your Mind but are Never Impossible
• Beautiful Design
• Top Notch Voice Acting

CONS

• Co-op Can Ruin Friendships
• The Game Ends

 

2007’s Portal was the surprise success of the year, packaged in with Valve’s “Orange Box.” Being an incredibly innovative and unique first person puzzle game, with fantastic writing and acting, it won more than a few Game of the Year awards from people. Now we find ourselves four years later, finally getting a sequel. And what a sequel it is.

Portal 2 once again places you in the orange jumpsuit of test subject named Chell, who wakes up in the Aperture Science facility once again, years after the events of the first game. In the original Portal players weaved their way through puzzle after puzzle, facing off against a sadistic AI GLaDOS, eventually escaping the facility. Portal 2 takes players on an even grander journey; with new environments and new tools to solve puzzles Portal 2 is truly a masterpiece.

The game starts off with Chell meeting a talkative little robot who goes by the name of Whetley (who is magnificently voiced by Stephen Merchant) who is quick to help aid your escape. Wheatley, is a great addition to the Portal cast and plays a very important role in the story. Oh and it wouldn’t be a Portal game without the return of everyone’s favorite sociopathic robot GLaDOS. The story will take you through more twists and turns, and help players uncover more about Aperture Science, its history, and those who helped shape it. The story is easily one of the biggest draws of this game, so I’ll do my best to avoid spoiling it throughout this review.

Portal 2’s dialogue is some of the best you’ll find in a videogame, to the point where the humorous dialogue delivered through the hysterical voice acting serves as an incentive for players to solve puzzles and proceed through the gamespace.

Every pixel in the game is there for a reason, and you’ll never find yourself having to finagle over ledges or feeling like you need to jump and glitch to make something work. Valve has done a brilliant job of making Portal 2 a linear experience without ever making it feel like a liner experience, you are led from area to area in such a way that you always end up where you need to but it seems as though you got there yourself, the game didn’t put you there.

Just like the first game the puzzles in Portal 2 are brilliantly designed, Portal 2 does a nice job of easing people into the mechanics that will be needed to solve more complex problems later on. The opening levels will have simple solutions simply shoot portals to cross a room, as you go on you’ll gain new tools which will be used to help you along. Boxes that can be used to relect lasers, redirectable light bridges, and gravity fields, and of course the gels. The gels are a huge addition to the game, there are three in total, each with its own unique properties and abilities, and each one can be maneuvered to stick to any surface. Blue gel will cause any surface to act like a trampoline bouncing you around to sometimes massive heights, orange gels will allow you to run at incredible speeds, and white gel will allow portals to be placed on previously unaccommodating surfaces. As you progress you’ll have to use, portals, gels, bridges, lasers, and gravity fields all in unison to solve some truly brain bashing puzzles. This can seem very overwhelming at first glance but once a puzzle is solved you’ll feel like the smartest person in the world. There was more than one occasion where I was simply over thinking a lot of the challenges that had been laid in front of me, so I simply had to step back and take a mental break (good tip).

In addition to a single player campaign that is already rather lengthy, Portal 2 comes equipped with its own separate co-op campaign. You wont just be retreading the single player game with two people, you have four new chapters with eight sets of puzzles for each one. One partner will take control of Atlas a short stocky robot, and the other will take control of P-body who looks like one of the games turrets with arms and legs stuck on him. Both players have a portal gun of their own meaning you now have puzzles that utilize four sets of portals.

Each co-op campaign you play is linked up with your partner, this means if you just hop into random games with people you’ll merely be doing the first few puzzles over and over again. Gestures are used to help communicate places to put portals and help time for synchronized lever pulls. Although in my experience voice chat serves all the functions much better and can at times be a necessity.

Portal 2 is an absolute joy of a game, it’s the best looking game Valve has put out just in terms of pure graphical power, every puzzle will give you pure joy to complete, an ingenious story, great dialogue and characters, and a robust co-op campaign, all elevate Portal 2 to the status of one of the greatest games that has ever been made. You absolutely can not afford to miss this one.