Portal 2
The long awaited sequel to Valve’s breakthrough 2007 hit Portal hit Steam and store shelves 2 days ago, and having frantically watched the clock until I was able to install the game (because I was definitely not going to download 10GB), I began to play it. I still haven’t finished it, but from what I can tell, here’s my review…
Portal 2 is an amazing game. That’s all I should have to say. Of course I’m going to go into more detail. But that’s the rough idea.
I’d like to talk about the plot to start with. This game has a much more outlined plot than the original Portal, and its most definitely full of twists and turns, which I’d love to spoil for you all because they’re brilliant; but I won’t. But it takes the player on a very structured yet spacey tour of Aperture Science through which the plot progresses. And this is great, a good game should have a good plot and story, and this plotline is fantastic.
Furthermore, the dialogue and characters in Portal 2 is amazing. You start off with good old Wheatley, who helps you through the start and up to GLaDOS’ resting place, followed by several levels with GLaDOS speaking before everything goes absolutely insane and you’re trekking through the old Science Spheres with Cave Johnson as the narrator; and after that I don’t know because I still haven’t finished it. I’m not the greatest gamer, I’m probably only about 40% through judging by my achievements. The dialogue is funny as hell, though, which is just what I was expecting, but with so many different personalities there is so much more variety than just the maniacal sociopathic Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System.
I must say that the levels are well thought out and very fun, and the new elements such as the hard light bridge and the various gels add much needed variety to the challenges. However, the free-roaming aspects of the game wherein one progresses from level to level in the latter areas of the game are very challenging, and I’m currently finding it really difficult to progress. But its a good kind of difficulty, because I’ll keep looking for new ways to solve the challenge, rather than if I was just trying to beat the same boss yet I just sucked; which would be the bad kind of difficulty. Does that make sense?
Also, its good to see that the Potato Sack ARG made sense to the plot; so far potatoes have been kind of significant and its a good joke.
Now, co-operative mode! This is fun!
Playing with a friend is brilliant, you can tell them where to put portals and help each other and its just great, so there’s nothing wrong there. Its just great. Great, great, great, great, great great. great.
Online match-up is a bit different. I don’t really want to use a microphone for random play so I have to resort to typing which is annoying at the best of times. Not knowing the other player means also not knowing whether they are any good or not, so often it can be challenging to judge who does what.
I suppose I’ll move on to my rating now…
As I said before, Portal 2 is a brilliant game. It’s clever, funny, intuitive, challenging, co-operative and FUN. Its long enough too. And so, I give Portal 2 a rating of 9.5 out of 10.
WOW JACK