Portal 2
Valve have done an incredible job in taking what was essentially a bonus add-on in the Orange Box game pack from a few years ago, and fleshing it out into its own incredible story and gaming world.
Portal 2 takes you back to the Aperture Science complex from the original game; this time, you travel much deeper into the bowels of the factory, and discover more about its history and characters.
Portal 2 is essentially a puzzle game disguised as a First Person Shooter. You travel through a series of rooms looking to escape the laboratory; each room presents you with a different puzzle to overcome.
Most of these puzzles are solved by using the Portal gun; shooting with the left trigger will create an orange portal, and the right trigger will open the corresponding blue portal.
The puzzles rely on you using incredible cunning and ingenuity to place the portals in certain spaces, to make it past deep chasms or around machine gun turrets and lasers.
Without spoiling too much, the puzzles really are much more than this; the scope and creativity the team at Valve have come up with when creating the puzzles is hugely impressive.
Only on a few occasions did I find myself struggling with a puzzle, but this didn’t take away from the immersive experience; I was still impressed by how creative that puzzle had been, and still felt like a genius for solving it.
Moving further on from Portal’s one portal here one portal there solutions, Valve introduced different coloured liquids that change the environment around you. One liquid makes the floor have an extra bounce, allowing the player to search higher areas.
Another liquid increases velocity of the player, allowing them to quickly reach areas, or build up speed for a jump across a gap. The final liquid allows you to choose where you can create portals freely. Using a combination of these liquids to your benefit is tricky, and adds an interesting dimension to the puzzle difficulty.
The real star of the Portal 2 show is the humour. Always right on the ball, Portal 2 is written brilliantly; helped along by an all-star cast, including the brilliant Stephen Merchant as Wheatley.
Your spherical robot side-kick helps you break out of your initial holding cell, and then helps you throughout your adventure.
Rattling along constantly in his Bristolian accent, Merchant brings the character alive, in what could be one of gaming’s best voice-acting performances yet.
If there is only one reason why you should play through Portal 2, it would be for its fantastic sense of humour; the evil Glados’ jibes combined with Wheatley’s simple retorts, offer something unique in game story-telling.
The game itself does look fantastic; travelling through different areas of the Aperture science labs, including the original test chambers of the early 1900’s, through to the factory production line and the hi-tech modern test environments.
Every environment brings something new to the table, and offers something different to look at whilst essentially remaining just another backdrop for a puzzle. The engine isn’t as impressive as some of the recent First Person Shooters we have seen, but this really doesn’t create any problems, as the aesthetic style is pleasing and ambitious.
The addition of a Co-operative mode, adds a whole new gameplay experience. Just like the single-player, you have to go through a series of test chambers to complete the task. In the co-operative mode, the learning curve is much steeper than the single player. The game assumes that you have played the single player, but it isn’t impossible to quickly work out what to do.
This is real co-operative gaming; playing Portal 2 with a friend was the first time in a game I had to stop, think and discuss our options to solve a puzzle. If it wasn’t for us working together, the puzzles would have been completely un-solvable; when we made a puzzle breakthrough, a mutual and unique sense of accomplishment was felt.
The co-op mode does add a whole new lease of life to the game, but I can’t imagine that many people will want to return to it after completing all of the puzzles in the single player and multiplayer modes.
The main challenge in the game is coming up with a solution; once this has been found, you won’t receive that rewarding challenge complete feeling again. Valve have always been incredibly generous with their downloadable content, so it comes as no surprise that they will be bringing out plenty of extra levels and challenges.
Hopefully, these extra levels will create enough interest for players to keep hold of Portal 2, as some of the challenge modes in the original Portal were just as intriguing as the main story.
First Person Shooters usually contain lots of violence and even more blood to go with it. Portal 2 doesn’t cheapen itself with any of this; it is a classy, challenging and humorous experience.
Portal 2 has a discreet way of telling a deep and immersive backstory, but this doesn’t mean you would miss it if you were to blink; it’s unique take on the puzzle solving genre could potentially be rewarding for every type of player, if they manage to get past the often mind-bending portal mechanics. A real must play.
Verdict: 9/10
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360, PC
Genre: Puzzle/FPS
Publisher/Developer: Valve
Release: April 2011
Edward Lewis Female First