Review: Portal 2

If you haven’t played Portal yet, you probably don’t know your life is incomplete.

I recently bought a gaming capable laptop about a month ago and was forced to play Portal.  After four hours of nonstop enlightenment, I got out of my chair, brushed the Cheetos particles from my luxurious beard and walked away a new man. But what if that Portal monkey on your back is getting hungry? Or what if you want your very own Portal monkey but don’t have a PC to play it on? Never fear, Portal 2 is here! It’s an overdose of awesome, playable on PC and consoles (not Wii) and it will not disappoint.

Portal 2 starts off with player waking up in the Aperture Laboratories, the human behavior research facility from the first game. You soon find out very quickly that things have gone haywire. Aperture has fallen apart without GlaDOS, Portal’s  A.I. antagonist  to run things. Walls are crumbling, test chambers malfunction and every room the player moves through is riddled with smashed windows, natural overgrowth and broken machinery. Right off the bat,  you are introduced to Wheatly, a sarcastic, motor-mouthed droid voiced by Stephen Merchant, and reunited with the Portal Gun, which creates interconnecting portals capable of bending distances, and physics, in their environment. You are also eventually reunited with GlaDOS, who takes offense at your presence and decides that a new round of potentially lethal tests is in order.

This might sound eerily similar to the first Portal, but don’t worry this is a whole new ballgame. Yes, using the Portal Gun to make your way through every new environment is the core premise of the game and don’t forget cubes, gun turrets, floating platforms and pressure pads are all here for the reunion,  but Valve has added some mind-bending mechanics and tools to the mix.

As you advance through the Apeture Lab you’re introduced to new items that the research facility has created to exercise the brain and this is where the game shines. There are “Hard Light Bridges”, which can create walkways or block off the sensors of lasers and gun turrets. There are “Aerial Faith Plates”, which fling the player through the air. There’s “Propulsion Gel”, which allows you to zoom across the floor, building momentum for jumps and portal leaps. Puddles of Repulsion Gel can create areas you can bounce on, and the greater the distance you drop on to the repulsion gel, the higher you’ll fly through the air. White Gel can be sprayed on to surfaces to make them “Portal Gun-friendly”. Excursion funnels are blue tubes of anti-gravity, which gently transport the player from one end of the map to the other, and they too can be redirected and repositioned with the Portal Gun. Of course, Valve is nice enough to ease you into all these new elements but soon enough they crank up the difficulty to overdrive.

The puzzle rooms are incredibly well designed in that there is no solid rule with the games difficulty curve. When the tutorials are out of the way, it’s up to you to break the code. Even if one player finds the solution to one particular room obvious, it doesn’t mean that someone else will, and some puzzles took me up to an hour to solve. All the while GlaDOS douses you with hilarious contempt for your efforts.

The humor in Portal 2 is by far my favorite part of the game. Without giving too much of the game’s plot away, you will find Portal 2 funny throughout, but also faintly spine chilling. GlaDOS and Wheatly are equally hilarious and monstrous and the Aperture Labs take on an increasingly oppressive atmosphere as you venture deeper into the facility, learning more about its origins. The main campaign is much longer than in the first Portal. It took me 3 hours on Portal 1 and about 9 hours on Portal 2.  Not to mention, when you’re done with the single player you and a buddy can tackle the co-op mode. This mode is a standalone story starring two droids, Atlas and Peabody, who are sent testing by GlaDOS. You have to get to start to finish like single player but the puzzles require two people to get there, and fair warning, this mode can test a relationship. The test chambers get quite complex and require total cooperation to complete them. Which means it can get frustrating, which also means, my wife and I yelled at each other…..ALOT!  The cool thing is, is that this mode doesn’t feel like a cheesy add-on. It is just as fun as single player and offers more glorious hours of gameplay.

When you’re done with Single player and co-op mode and still want more. Don’t worry, Valve is dropping some DLC this summer for all consoles which contains new test chambers for players, leader-boards, and a challenge mode for single and multiplayer modes. All of this for the low price of $0. Yup, its free.

For all you PS3’ers out there, when you buy Portal 2, it comes with the PC version as well. You can link your PS3 with your steam account (if you have one if not you can make one) so you can view your friends achievements and what-not. The only downside is that you can’t play cross console co-op.  I think that’s why they threw in the free PC version, just my guess.

Overall Valve has created another masterpiece with Portal 2. The amount of content, the mind-bending mechanics and overall fun experience are almost certain to satisfy fans of the first game and to all newcomers to the series. Without a doubt play this game!