Overdue Review: Portal 2 (PC)

Butler brings you the scoop on Portal 2 and his thoughts on what makes for an effective sequel.  He'll try to keep his delighted squealing to a minimum, though promises nothing.  Find out if this game is awesome, or the awesome-EST after the jump.

Portal was a very rare game.  There were precisely two characters (of which only one had any spoken lines), no actual weapons, and no mobile enemies. But thanks to its brilliant pacing, bleak and hilarious writing, and some of the best level design I have ever seen, it is in that rare pantheon of games that I call "perfect".  Some people complained that it was too short (as even on the first try it was beatable in about 4 hours), but those people can just fuck right the hell off and go back to playing as the umpteenth iteration of HGH infused army-mens that desperately try to make their two hour game drag on for 5 times that amount.  I won't lie, though: I was confident that Valve was going to deliver a very solid experience with Portal 2, but did worry that, as a sequel to a title that was built on a sturdy but sparsely utilitarian frame, the game would feel more like an expansion to the original than a new game that would warrant a $50 expenditure.  Fortunately, Valve does not mess around when it comes to game design, and they have delivered a product for which I would gladly have paid double.

Portal 2 opens in the Aperture Science "extended relaxation chamber", where your character (Chell) is brought out of a cryogenic sleep to find that the entire facility is going to hell in a hastily constructed hand basket.  A chipper British robot by the name of Wheatley arrives to tell her that he can get her out of there and leads her relaxation pod back to the enrichment center to acquire a portal gun and escape.  I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but Wheatley eventually leads Chell through the chamber where GLaDOS (the murderous and hilarious AI from Portal) used to reside, only to find that she is still alive and still bitter at Chell for that whole "killing her" thing.  GLaDOS separates Chell from Wheatley and throws her in to her new and improved test chambers so that the tests for science can continue.

Such as this one, which "utilizes deadly lasers to study the
effects on test subjects when exposed to deadly lasers."

I'll stop with the plot exposition at this point because it's simply too brilliant for me to want to spoil much of it.  I can also pretty much ignore talking about the majority of the gameplay as it basically plays like Portal.  What has me blowing my load all over the keyboard is the fact that this game is a legitimate successor to the Portal throne, and not simply a pack of bonus maps.  Here is a list of elements that return from the original:

*Chell (you)

*GLaDOS

*The kind of adorable talking turrets

*Portals (and the rules for how they work)

Obviously, the goal is still to make your way to the exit of each test chamber, but you use almost entirely new tools to do so.  The above screen shot shows the "discouragement beams" that you have to redirect with mirrored cubes to activate switches in other locations.  There are also solid light bridges that can be directed through portals to cross gaps, anti-gravity funnels that can carry objects or Chell from place to place, and 3 kinds of gel that have different effects when sprayed on walls and floors (allowing you to run faster, jump higher, or  place portals on surfaces that ordinarily would not allow it).  By relying on a completely different set of devices, no puzzle beyond the introductory set of tests feels recycled from the first game, keeping the experience as gratifying as it was 4 years ago.

If there is something more satisfying than dispatching
turrets by covering them in gel that makes them bounce
all over the room, I don't want to hear about it.

The overall atmosphere is yet another area where Portal 2 shines brighter than Kanye's grill under a flood light.  True, the Enrichment Center is technically a recycled element from the first game, but the sequel leads you through several different stages, from ruins of old tests, to GLaDOS' sleek new chambers, to a subterranean level which was abandoned after the death of Aperture's CEO, to a last iteration which I won't spoil here.  The game uses each setting to expound upon the history of Aperture, the origin of GLaDOS, and further characterization of the rest of the limited cast, and it does so in such depth that you get sucked in almost immediately.  There is more than just you and one homicidal AI this time around, but given that all of the characters are either robots or pre-recorded messages, there is still that sense of isolated dread that, at best, nothing in this environment remotely cares about you, and at worst, wants you dead very badly.  It was the incredibly dark undertones of Portal that made its story so compelling, and this is something that the writers of Portal 2 have not lost touch with at all, keeping the writing sharp, grim, and hilarious all the way through to its "oh-my-god-that-just-happened" ending.

Though a party with cake has yet to occur

I can sum up my thoughts on the multiplayer significantly more concisely.  You know how I just spent the last 5 paragraphs giving a verbal hummer to the single player campaign?  Well, with the co-op campaign you get to play through an entirely different set of maps with a friend, all of which require strategic use of your 4 combined portals to solve.  I'm trying to come up with a circumstance where that doesn't sound better than a surprise Megan Fox stripper-gram, but I just can't do it.

Valve could very easily have given us another series of clean white rooms with momentum puzzles and bouncing electrical sparks with Portal 2, but it seems like they may be one of the only major developers out there that don't view gamers with nothing but scathing contempt, and opted to deliver a real sequel rather than just repackaging their old game and making the number go up by one.  Yes, it is still somewhat short (single player runs about 6-9 hours while co-op runs about 5-6) but much like its predecessor, it knows exactly how long to stay before gracefully bowing out the door.  If only certain other franchises would take the fucking hint.

Or they could just keep padding out a half-hour of content
into 10 hours of game.  Whatever.