Portal 2

Portal 2 is the followup to Portal which was originally a pack in the the Orange Box. Portal 1 could not have held up as a stand alone product which is why many people were doubting Valve’s decision to make Portal 2 a full retail game. The original Portal only clocked in around three-four hours, which as a pack in with four other games is long enough. Portal 2 is full price and it is a full length game. First play-through of the single-player netted me around eight hours. The single-player could have been all this game had to offer and it would be worth the money.

The single player in Portal 2 is similar to Portal 1. You wake up in a creepily sterile room with no recollection how you got there. A robot gifted with the job to maintain all other test subjects, Wheatley barges in on you to save you as you are the only test subject left. And along your journey you meet and wake up an old friend from the first game, GlaDOS. She is now extremely angry at you for killing her and she wants to keep you testing until one of you dies, and as she is an AI we all know how that would end. Wheatley then joins forces with you to take down GlaDOS. That is all I really want to say about the story as I believe that is the best part of Portal 2. All I will say is it is a lot of back and forth in antagonist.

The progression in the single-player is just like it was in Portal 1. You go through test chambers in hopes of accomplishing something. All throught out the test chambers new testing materials are introduced. Of course the first thing you get is the Blue Portal Gun which is followed shortly by the Orange Portal Gun. That is nothing new for people who had played the first Portal. Now where the new materials come in is in the form of different color gels. Orange, blue, and white to be specific. The first gel you are introduced to is the blue gel. This is repulsion gel. Which is really just a scientific term for, this gel makes you bounce. This is used in combination with portals, of course, to reach high spots or to get vertical speed up to make tricky jumps with your portal skills. The next is the orange gel, or speed gel. As the name implies this makes you faster. Now this speed is horizontal speed, it is this games running. This is used to gain speed to,again, make tricky jumps. Now the white gel is where it gets interesting. Have you gotten frustrated when you have an easy way to complete a puzzle, but the surface is not portal-able. The white gel fixes that problem. With the power of crushed moon rocks the white gel allows any surface covered in it to be portalable.

Now new testing materials is cool and all but single-player can get boring after having played it once. Well Valve knows this so they included a totally separate cooperative mode. You play as Atlas and Pea-Body, two robot test subjects constructed since humans are so inconsistent and require feeding. The story ties in with the main story of the single-player but is a completely different story. In this mode players must combine their feeble minds to solve all test chambers . With two players you get four different portals. Also included with the co-op mode is the ping tool. This is allows one player to tag where they want their partner to place a portal. This can be insanely helpful since it could be frustrating if your partner is not the sharpest tool in the shed.

There are around a five voice actors in Portal 2. Now this is definitely a case of quality over quantity as Stephen Merchant and everybody’s favorite voice actor, Nolan North, show up for one hell of a performance. All writing is spot on with Portal’s clever sense of humor. Never through my play-through of Portal 2 was I ever tired of any of the dialogue even after hearing it a few times, due to me failing to comply to the living standard. In the start of the game the test chambers of falling apart and you notice GlaDOS rushing to pull things together. This is a nice change from Portal 1 where everything was squeaky clean and white. Especially in the middle part of the game you are being given outdoor environments to cause havoc in. Even when stuck in side the stuffy test chambers you occasionally get some greenery protruding through panels.

Overall Portal 2 is a complete improvement in every way over Portal 1. Art style, voice acting,and witty sense of humor are all vamped up in Portal 2. It is incredible how much Valve continues to do with the Source Engine which at this point is a good four years old with no major overhauls. With games like Portal and Left 4 Dead both using the source engine, both being completely different games, shows that Valve knows what they are doing. This is most shown in Portal 2, an easy game of the year candidate when the time rolls around.