Review – Portal 2

First-Person Puzzle

It’s not made from plants, it’s made from chemicals by sick bastards.

Lurk

And our next stop is Brainfuckville.

As I’m sure you already Portal 2 is the sequel to the very popular first-person puzzler that was part of Valve’s Orange Box collection. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, I’m sure you know the mechanics of the game and how you use the portal gun to shoot one of two coloured portals to transport you around the levels. The original game was fairly short, since it was a part of a compilation of games. The sequel’s single player is at least twice as long as the original and there’s a separate co-operative multiplayer campaign. So there’s definitely a lot more game there but one of the joys of the original game was it didn’t drag itself out too long. Thankfully this game whilst longer than the original manages to keep it interesting by constantly adding new game mechanics as you go along.

So to begin with it gets you orientated to using the portals with one static portal and one you control with the portal gun, before it lets you control both. Once that’s done it will introduce lasers which have to be pointed at thing on the wall. So the first time you just use a portal, then it introduces these cube with lenses in that let you redirect the lasers. So each of these elements give you an introduction as to how you use them, then it slowly adds more to them. The various puzzle elements in the game apart from the lasers are, things that send you flying through the air, hard light bridges and gravity beams. The other elements are the different coloured gels which will let you bounce on them to jump higher, move faster or can be used to place portals where they couldn’t previously be placed. As you progress through the game the game requires you to use many of these elements simultaneously.

Looks like the 'Solar Power Generator' level from Manic Miner but is probably not nearly as horrifyingly difficut.

So far I haven’t talked about the plot of the game and a big reason for this is I don’t want to spoil anything for those who have yet to play it. The basis is after the first game the protagonist Chell gets captured and put into suspended animation, in what at first looks like a cheap motel. You get woken up by Wheatley, an AI personality orb voiced by Stephen Merchant, and from there you encounter GLaDOS. You get trapped in the testing centre and eventually end up in an old part of the Aperture Science’s compound. Whilst there you find out a lot more about the history of Aperture Science and its founder Cave Johnson who is voiced by J.K. Simmons. There is a great sense of humour throughout the story and all of the voice actors do a very good job.

The co-op uses all of the same puzzle elements as the single player game, but you also have some more complex puzzles due to the fact you have four portals that can be used between the two robots you control. There are many times where one person has to place the portals for the other, due to fields which cause all of your portals to disappear once you go through them. The length of the co-op campaign isn’t that long, but it is still about as long as the original game and gets really quite fiendish near the end. Now I played through the co-op on my PS3 with a friend doing it split screen, so it was very easy to communicate.

Mark Secondary Review Lightning rarely strikes twice, especially in the world of videogames.  Stuffed as it is with numerous blaverage sequels like Just Cause 2, Bioshock 2 and Crysis 2. Well thankfully Valve have once again delivered a sequel that has everything you’d want by getting almost everything right along the way. The new puzzles are a head scratching mix of logic sequences mixed with nosebleed inducing psychics and the visuals, while looking a little basic thanks to the ageing Steam engine would make M. C. Escher proud. The writing is also better with no bullshit ‘the cake is a lie’ style memes being repeated every other sound clip along with top notch voice work from Stephen Merchant, J. K. Simmons and another maddeningly catchy end of game tune from Jonathan Coulton. If you liked the first Portal game or the original Narbacular Drop you should really get this ASAP as it’s well worth your time and money and for those of you who didn’t enjoy the first round of testing at the enrichment centre be assure the inclusion of co-op mode makes the game even better than before despite all the TF2 costume bullshit included to separate the foolish from their shekels. Secondary Score: 9/10

If you are playing online though you shouldn’t have any difficulties, Valve have implemented a pointer that you can use to point things out to your partner and even use special symbols so you can point out where you want to put a in or out portal. There’s even a countdown which can be used on switches and certain other parts of the puzzles that require co-operative timing. I played with Mark on the PC and I didn’t have my headset set up at the time and using the pointer along with typing in the in-game chat we managed to complete the first two chapters with ease.

Graphically the game isn’t a great advance over the first game, but it does look polished and it is easy to tell where you can place a portal or not, due to only being able to place them on white walls. The added zoom function also helps to see where you need to place portals over a long distance. I did have a little bit of problem with some of the physics in the game, there were a couple of times I placed boxes down and they either fell off a button or I knocked them out of the way by accidentally walking into them. Another thing I find an annoyance is Valve’s recent infatuation with hats, whilst they have a long track record of giving out free DLC for the PC versions of their games I hate the added in-game store where you can buy different skins and accessories for your robot when you play the game in co-op. These add nothing to the game and are just another way of gouging cash from their users.

Minor gripes aside I thoroughly enjoyed Portal 2 and I can’t wait for more co-op levels to be released or even some challenge maps for the single player game.

Rating: 8/10