Portal 2

I won't bother with a long preamble since you know roughly what Portal 2 is and are probably thinking about whether to get it now or wait for a price drop. Before I start I feel I should also say that I avoided reading anything about Portal 2 because I knew it would be an automatic buy for me since it's a Valve game so I can give a review that's unaffected by the hype surrounding the game.

Portal 2 shows the same incredible level of polish that marks recent Valve games but some of this polish smooths away the rougher edges that made their older games so much fun. It's odd to criticise a game for being too polished but if you've played through Half-Life Episode 1 or 2 you'll know what I mean. It's the phenomenon where certain minor aesthetic parts of the game receive a huge amount of attention and are constantly redesigned to perfection but other gameplay elements are often made very simple or sections outstay their welcome. The same problems are present in Portal 2. Have you come up with a different way to solve a puzzle that the developers didn't anticipate? Tough. Each puzzle has been play-tested to death and one solution has been locked down as  inviolable. Any ingenious approach to finishing a puzzle is usually stymied by a piece of scenery specifically placed to stop you or by  ubiquitous invisible walls. In the original Half-Life you could often find new and interesting paths through environments but here - where that idea is a key selling point - the developers want to show you how clever they are and you are just along for the ride. The puzzles are often very satisfying to solve but you'll notice that the number of surfaces on which you can place Portals has been dramatically reduced. You'll often enter one of the puzzle rooms to find vast swathes of black with only three or four squares where you can place a Portal. This was something that started to really disappoint me about halfway through the game when the behind-the-scenes areas of the first game reappear and gameplay often degenerates into a pixel hunt in dark environments to find one or two Portal surfaces.

The story is well done but is a little too self-conciously trying to be funny or wacky. This is summed up in the new character of Wheatley, a floating robot orb who accompanies you for large parts of the game. The joke is basically that he's an idiot and he makes similar one-liners to Glados from the original game. But the joke is repeated throughout and it starts to wear a little thin as the game goes on. Each puzzle begins with you exiting from a lift and then solving the puzzle, before getting a funny little comment from one of the many disembodied voices in the game. This formula is repeated so frequently that it starts to get very noticable. It's not helped by the very frequent loading points either. It's not that the loading times are particularly long or anything but each puzzle room, no matter how short, is duly followed by a lift which leads to another load point. Valve games used to lead the way in terms of seamless loads but Portal 2's loads were actually quite obtrusive. The game cuts to a full-on loading screen once you get into the lift; if a voice-over is playing the lift will continue going and you can see things whizzing past until the voice comes to an end and then you're hit with a loading screen before repeating the process again. Why doesn't the game just use the lift to mask the loading times like Metroid Prime or countless other games? It may be a Source engine limitation but when so much attention is lavished on the character designs and beautiful geometry it seems strange that the wizards at Valve couldn't develop a streaming technology or built bigger areas.

I've gone back and forth between positive and negative in this review but that's how I felt while playing the game. It has some amazing moments which are well worth the price of admission but then there are also areas which are strangely dull or make you feel like you are just going through the motions. The puzzles never got to the fiendish level I was hoping for. I suppose in avoiding all the hype I had built up my own image that this would be something like the Lost Levels of Portal with incredibly complicated puzzles to ponder over. Even as I got near the end of the game the puzzles (save one or two) felt quite straight-forward. I was hoping this criticism would be mitigated by the presence of a challenge mode with extra-difficult puzzles like the original but sadly there is none. It's left to the co-op to scratch that particular itch and it often provided puzzles which were sufficiently complex to feel very satisfying to solve. Yet Portal 2's brand of puzzle solving is more enjoyable solo - it's not much fun with a partner when you're stuck whereas on your own it can be more like Picross where it is enjoyable to ponder for ages over a solution and let it click into place. It would be nearly more fun to go through the co-op with two controllers on your own to get some added value out of the puzzles. Sounds silly? Well yes, but the co-op felt like the one place that gave me a glimpse of what Portal 2's puzzle rooms could do. Valve loves to build tutorials naturally into the gameplay but in Portal 2 I still felt like I was been shown the ropes even though I was hours into the game. So is it worth buying for €50? If you weren't so excited as to go out and get it straight away I would say that it probably isn't. You will definitely enjoy most of your 8 hours with Portal 2 but you may be left feeling that if Valve had spent more time making more puzzles than making you watch some of the amazing cinematics you might have gotten more for your money.