Game review: Portal 2

Comments about Portal (1 +2 alike) on youtube have a very unique way of making me fly off the handle. I'd better explain, but to do that we'll need to start at the beggining.

So, what is Portal? Short answer: a puzzle game. Long answer: Portal is member of the elite, and by elite I mean game mods developed by gamers themselves for a commercial game out there, which, however, were so good that the original developers took notice. And financed/bought/hired them. Among this elite are Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Red Orchestra and Killing Floor. The fact there's only two developers for all six of those mods, though, is just sad. But I digress. 

The original Portal took the gaming world by storm. A mod for Half-Life 2, Portal redefined the way we think of puzzles, space, dimensions and changed what we thought possible in games. Of course, portals have existed in games since at least Doom 2, so, what was the major difference here?

Maybe it was because at its core was a simple, yet interesting story. Maybe it was Chell, the mute protagonist (a Valve staple, it seems). Or maybe it was the portal gun, a gun that would shoot two types of portals, one blue, one orange, that were interlinked. Or, maybe, just maybe, it was the fiendishly clever puzzle-rooms that you had to navigate, not with brawn but with brain, not with bullets but with portals. Of course, going in one portal (->{}) and coming out another ({}->) wasn't the sole mechanic of puzzle solving. You had to calculate for momentum, trajectories, timing, and other room-specific variables such as lasers, turrets that would shoot on site, the whole shebang. I don't mind saying I sometimes spent more than half an hour trying to figure out the trickiest of advanced levels.

And, under it all, was a story about one woman versus a positively and delightfully mad A.I., GlaDOS, scribblings on the wall and the promise of cake. Also, since it was a standalone mod (meaning you didn't have to own a copy of Half-Life 2 to actually play it), it didn't cost much to get it, all by its magnificent lonesome, through Steam, Valve's own X-box Live, Games for Windows and Online games shop all rolled into one. Heck, it was even slapped in as a bonus in Valve's Orange Box, a who's who of their greatest games to (that) date.

In short, Portal was one of the greatest games of all time.

Now, onwards to Portal 2. In my humble opinion, it is well worth paying the full price for it, despite the aforementioned youtube comments. Why? Let's break it down.

Story-wise, it follows the one from the original Portal (well, almost, seeing as a few months ago Valve went ahead and changed the ending to accommodate a sequel). The rest of this paragraph will contain spoilers, and I'm only making this sentence long enough so you won't have any right to complain that I didn't warn you about it instead of skipping to the next one. You are still Chell, the mute girl who doubles as a test subject in Aperture Science, not willingly, if I might add. You are still trying to get out of the facility. This time, you're accompanied by Wheatley, one of GlaDOS' personality spheres, voiced (superbly) by Brit comedian Steve Merchant. For much of the game, Wheatley is going to be your mostly incompetent sidekick, until he accidentally revives GlaDOS and, inescapably, helps you defeat her again. But, nature abhors a vacuum. In dethroning GlaDOS, Wheatley takes her place, goes mad with power, turns GladDOS into a freakin' potato battery (PotatOS?) and sends you both hurling deep in the bowels of Aperture. It is there you will learn the decades of Aperture's rise and decline, its few eggs sort of a dozen CEO, its credo and the CEO's second in command, Caroline, who just so turns out to be GlaDOS' AI template. Long story short, with GlaDOS' help you navigate your way back up, a rudimentary friendship and a begrudging respect born among you in the way, to confront Wheatley before he (accidentally) lets the whole facility suffer a nuclear meltdown.

Now, gameplay wise (assuming you skipped the last paragraph, I only got one word for you: potato), it's still the same puzzle game it always was, albeit with a few twists. New mechanics are introduced, slowly but surely: the hard light bridges, the prism cubes, the gravity wells, the gels (one blue, which repels, one orange, which speeds you up, and one white, which allows portals to be put on surfaces than normally wouldn't allow it). And yes, these are all only as useful as a well-placed portal can make them. Making portals is still integral to the gameplay, and let's face it, this is why the game is called Portal and not Gels. This new series of puzzles will give you at least a couple of hours of fun, along with some sequences of frantic but basic platforming, also known as the "holy crap run!" moments. It feels significantly shorter than the original, however, and, astonishingly, the new variables introduced, the bridges, the gravitational wells, the gels, they all somehow manage to make the puzzles seemingly easier than the original's. No matter how good the story, voice acting and puzzles, you can't help but feel the ride was too short to enjoy at its max. Nevertheless, you'd be wrong. Because, you see, there's a whole new second campaign waiting for you, chum, and this time, you can bring a friend for the ride. Atlas and P-body are the two robots used as characters for the co-op campaign, which -yes, you guessed it- contains a whole new series of puzzle rooms which cannot be solved by one person alone. Jolly good fun to be had in these as well. and, single or co-op, there's nothing quite like the feeling you get from solving a particularly mind-boggling puzzle room only to enter the next one and try to figure that one out.

Which leave us to...graphics? You really expect me to talk about graphics? Yeah, okay, they're beautiful, but that's really, really not the point in this game. Blah blah engine showing its age blah blah beautiful particle effects blah blah high-res textures blah blahwhaddayawant from me? Are they like, any big-budget games without spectacular graphics these days? Let it be and solve those puzzles, damnit!

So, yeah, well worth full price, youtube comments guy who found it boring. In your face.