Before I get into my review of the sublime Portal 2 I first want to say a few words about how I will be reviewing games in general. I believe that a game has to be able to stand up on its single player with multiplayer as an option for those who wish to use it. As such in most cases my reviews will be based off of the single player alone unless specified. In particular there comes an issue with multiplayer when, for example Portal 2, the people you know want it on a different platform than you do. I don’t have the money to buy multiple copies of the game simply to test the multiplayer, nor do I intend to buy a version I don’t want and pay Microsoft for the ‘privilege’ of playing with other human beings. Right that said let’s get down to business.
Portal 2 is the full length to successor to, wait for it, Portal. Portal, for those of you who don’t know, was a gem of a game that was added almost as bonus content to Valve’s ‘The Orange Box’. If you haven’t played the original minimise this right now, get on Steam and download it for the measly £6.99 it will cost you. Done that? Good, now play it, its okay I can wait it’s not that long. Congratulations you’ve made one of the greatest decisions of your life.
The Portal games are best described as first person puzzle games in which the player use a gun that creates blue and orange portals to solve puzzles of increasing difficulty. That was pretty much all there was in the original but in the second instalment the guys at Valve added in some extra stuff to help keep it fresh and set it apart from its younger brother, after all this game was to be full length so there needed to be a little bit more! These extra’s come in the form of a different kind
of block that redirect lasers, I should stress at this point that many of the puzzles involve moving boxes or directing lasers onto buttons which open doors, and 3 gels which you spread around using portals. The gels each do different things, the blue one makes the floor or walls bouncy wherever you put it, the orange one makes you run very fast along it and the white one turns previously non portal-able surfaces into portal-able ones. Using these tools you have to try and escape the Aperture Science facility where you have ‘volunteered’ to be a test subject. I’m aware that the idea of moving a box onto a button or using Zelda-esque light directing may not sound enthralling but stick with me here.
The puzzles themselves start out very easy and get increasingly fiendish as you go along as you may expect, and in the sections where the gels are introduced there are some very clever ones indeed. That being said they are never so difficult that you’ll have to seek internet guides and I think this is in the games favour. There’s no point in making a puzzle so incredibly difficult that no one can do it but at the same time you need to feel challenged, after all this is a puzzle game. Thankfully Portal 2 is able to give us exactly the right amount of head scratching before the ultimate epiphany, and believe me when you solve some of the puzzles you can’t help but feel a great sense of achievement.
Perhaps where the game really stands out, physics bending challenges aside, is the writing. The two main characters you will hear are Glados, the robot left in charge of Aperture since everyone else has died, and Wheatley who is a small robotic node voiced expertly by Stephen Merchant. As a simple breakdown Wheatley is your clueless ally against the sarcastic, bitter and vengeful Glados who is a bit upset that you killed her at the end of the first game. Both of these characters are fantastic on their own, Glados constantly putting you down in an incredibly entertaining way and Wheatley full of pluck and optimism. Both made me literally laugh out loud which isn’t something that many games have done in the past. As much as they stand out as individuals it’s when they are together that they really shine, and that’s all I’ll say on the matter since I want to keep this as spoiler free as possible.
I feel it’s my duty to point out the very few bad points in the game so let’s get to that, far shorter, art of this review. Although the game looks beautiful there is a bit of a repetitive backdrop, especially once you reach the areas that are in tact and not being claimed back by nature. There are also a fair few sections where all you’re doing is walking along walkway with the occasional jump where it’s broken. These are longer than I would have liked and left me feeling slightly perturbed as I wanted to get to the next puzzle. Luckily even in those sections there is nice, if a bit grey, scenery to look at and they do give the sense of scale that they’re probably in there to do. Aperture is big and you certainly feel it when you’re wandering around with the facility stretching far above and around you. Again the major saving grace during the walkways is the writing, the voice over the tanoy spouting very amusing pre-recorded messages that are centuries out of date making me chuckle and taking the focus away from walking in a strait line.
That’s all there is to complain about. Seriously. This game is a masterpiece, I simply adore it. It’s funny, clever and engaging and it’s very easy to forgive the small niggles for the smile it will put on your face. It’s not even that short; I blasted through the original game in less than 3 hours and was worried at how it would translate to a full length title. I think 7-10 hours is a good clock to put on it given various play speeds and allowing time to get stuck for a bit every now and then. That may seem short but it’s at least as long as it takes to finish *insert generic inexplicably popular FPS title here* if not longer. There’s even a co-op multiplayer mode that I may review retrospectively once I’ve been able to play it. All that said I implore you to buy this game. The feeling you will get from playing it is something a lot of games don’t provide anywhere near enough of, fun. Copious amounts of the stuff and there is no better reason than that to purchase something designed form the ground up to be entertaining.
91%
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