Portal 2 - Review

There's two reasons why this is going up as late as it is.  One, I wanted something special for the 100th post, and two, I wanted to experience both single player and multi-player before posting the review of this one.  It should come to no surprise to anyone that I bought Portal 2 on launch day, took it home, and played through.  I wondered, as I put the disc in, what kind of personality the game would have after the events of the first game, and was very pleased to find that Portal 2 had much much more character to it than Portal ever did.

You start with being woken up by Wheatley, a blue personality core who is able to travel around the facility on rails acting as a guide to your ultimate objective - finding a way for both of you to get out.  The game takes place after the defeat of GLaDOS, the super computer who controls the facility, now dilapidated, until you unwittingly reactivate her.  What follows are many test chambers that improve upon each other while GLaDOS rebuilds the test facility.

Wheatley guides your way through the center trying to save you

For anybody who is new to the series, the basic idea is that you have a gun that shoots portals onto certain surfaces.  When two different portals are fired, they become linked together and you can then walk through one and come out of the other.  You'll use these portals along with different cubes to solve puzzles presented to you by GLaDOS.  Once finished, GLaDOS will usually make a back handed comment, seeing as those she's still upset from being murdered in the last game.
 
The puzzles, or test chambers, are very well put together.  There's never any point where you feel like you can't figure something out.  On the other hand, you don't always know what it is that you're trying to achieve, either.  You know you're trying to get to the exit, but it's not always obvious where it is, or what sequence of events needs to happen for you to get through its doors.   It's important to emphasize that the difficulty never unreasonably ramped up, I always felt that the game prepared me for the next challenge.

This is first and foremost a first person puzzle game, but the writing and voice acting cannot be ignored.  GLaDOS, Wheatley, and Cave Johnson are all done amazingly well, and add all of the character to the game.  Their quotes act as reason to figure out the puzzle you're in just so you can hear what they've got to say next.  They also reveal the story of the facility, what happened to it, and to some point, how you're involved with everything.

What am I supposed to do with these?!

The single player goes on for about 7 - 8 hours, and I was very pleased with it.  I don't know how they're going to go about doing a Portal 3, but I would never rule it out.  I just think that Valve is going to have a hard time topping themselves.

The multi-player adds on about another 6 hours of play, and must be played with another person.  There's no bots to help you out, but you probably wouldn't want to have one to spoil the puzzles.  Previous contributor Brian from the Castle Ravenloft reviews and I sat down one Sunday afternoon and plowed through the chapters.  He hadn't played the single player before we started, so it was a little bit of a rocky start, but once we got going, it was a lot of fun.

I had a hard time imagining what kind of puzzles they could do with multi-player that they couldn't with single player, but they pulled out all the stops to bring together a challenging, original, fun experience.  Each player has their own portal gun, each capable of firing two portals each.  This makes many of the puzzles to be more elaborate versions of the single player experience, but they always felt fresh and interesting.

You play as Atlas and P-Body, or Orange and Blue as referred to by GLaDOS

Alright, complaint time.  I have a couple minor complaints.  For one, some of the achievements are just there to be hard to do.  One of them is to hug three people on your friends list, meaning you have to have multiple friends who own copies of the game, and are wanting to go into multi-player. Another is to go through the multi-player (already requiring a friend the whole time) and then take another friend who has never played multi-player before through the calibration course.  Things like this are just there to be hard.  My second complaint seems to be pretty common, in that outside the testing chambers, it can be difficult to find exactly the right spots to place your portals to continue.  There's often a feeling of "I shouldn't be here", and yet you have to press on in the direction you're going to make progress.  I don't think we needed flashing arrows or anything, but hitting a tiny spot 500 feet in the air got old quick.

Portal 2 is a must pick up, if only for the single player.  If you have friends who want to go through the multi-player with you, you're going to just get that much more out of the game.  The writing, voice acting, puzzles, and story telling all come together in a delicious cake of awesome.  Don't hold off picking this up any longer, go and get it and have some fun... with science!