Back in 2007, Portal was a clever little puzzle game stapled onto Valve’s “Orange Box” game compilation that shocked and surprised us all with its complex puzzles and its amazing characters and story. It succeed mainly on the ingenuity of the portal gun and the user’s lack of knowledge on how the game would play. Fast forward to 2011, and Valve is at it again by giving us a full fledged retail release sequel in Portal 2. While being in Aperture Science again sounds great with GlaDos and the portal gun, does the full game have enough in it to sustain itself?
For those of you new to the Portal series, it is strongly recommended you go back and play the original Portal first before you play the sequel. The first Portal was not only a great game, teaches you the basic mechanics, and is only three hours long, it sets up a nice backstory within the game’s storyline that you will really miss out on if you’re playing through Portal 2 cold.
The original Portal ended with your “killing” Apeture Science’s artificial intelligence overlord GlaDOS in an attempt at gaining freedom for the protagonist, Chell. However, Chell is then recaptured and returned to the Aperture Science Research Facility. A unspecified amount of time later, Chell is awoken by Wheatly, a construct with a very interesting and hunorous personality (as voiced by British comedian Stephen Merchant; brilliant work).
In a somewhat humorous acknowledgement of the length of time between Portal and Portal 2, the Aperture Science Research Facility has been falling apart over the course of an unknown number of years. Not to spoil any of the story, but GlaDOS is eventually awoken and is angrier than ever. In her attempt to punish you for killing her, she puts you through even tougher series of tests, with Wheatley laughably attempting to break you out of the test chamber all the while.
You are introduced to many different characters that are just as amusing as GlaDOS, including Cave Johnson the founder of Aperture Science. While your character never has a single line of dialogue, Valve has done an amazing job fleshing out the characters with great voice actors. These characters help support the game to the point where you are laughing so hard at the lines these characters say; a lot of the time, you will find yourself pushing through just one more test chamber to hear what GlaDOS or Wheatley will say next.
Portal 2 takes you even farther than you can even imagine into the facility and gives you a in-depth view at the history and progress of Aperture Science. I would love to write about all the amazing things that happen within the game, but doing so would rid Portal 2 of one of the best parts of the game. However, while the story is so great there have been many other improvements in the game.
One of the major improvements on the game is the bevy of new features that have been added to make Portal 2 a even harder puzzle game. When you first start the game, it quickly reintroduces you to the core mechanics of the portal gun, but within a few rooms, the game starts showing you the new mechanics. There are quite a handful of new game mechanics all branded with the quirky Aperture Science naming system, including the Aerial Faith Plate (catapult), Hard Light Bridge (a bridge made out of light you can manipulate), Thermal Discouragement Beam (laser you can deflect), along with the Weighted Pivot Cube, and the Excursion Funnel.
They have also added three types of gel which are the Conversion Gel, Propulsion Gel, and the Repulsion Gel. While these elements by themselves aren’t that complicated to use, when you start opening up the rooms and combining them together, the game gets really tough quickly. In quite a few chambers I spent a bit of time having to do some trial and error due to the difficulty of these chambers. These chambers in lot of cases really focus on using timing based puzzles in conjunction with these new features to create amazing puzzles.
While the game has a great level of difficulty thanks to all the new mechanics, the game never drags at all. Valve does a great job stringing you along with the promise of new environments and great dialogue, which really makes you not want to stop. However, in a few cases I got quite tired while playing and struggled to finish a basic puzzle due to being so tired (I was also playing until three in morning). I could never blame the game for being broken in the puzzles, because I knew it wasn’t the controls or the game, it was just me.
We’ll finish up on the next page, including whether or not Steam’s cross platform support for co-op works!
Pages: 1 2
Loading tweets...
