So I finished the co-op in one very long sitting last Saturday, and I have to say it is just a hell of a lot more fun than the single player portion of Portal 2.
Don't get me wrong, the single player is great, but it's also missing a lot of what made Portal 1 so fun.
I never really struggled with Portal 2's single player simple because I understood the mechanics of portals so well from beating the first game so many times. The elements they added like Hard Light Bridges and the various gels were fun to use and served as interesting puzzle mechanics, but it never really went anywhere especially exciting. I never felt challenged to use these things in inventive ways to solve complicated problems, it was just "Your portal can guide a bridge, walk across it." or "Paint this area using portals so you can jump off of it." Everything felt like tutorial, much like the first game, but it was more additive learning rather than a whole new experience. It's kind of like learning long division. Fundamentally you are just doing the same thing, it just takes a bit longer and you have to take a few more factors into account.
There were only two moments where i really felt that "Aha!" sensation that was oh so prevalent in the original Portal and those were:
In co-op these moments are flying at you a mile a minute. Almost every puzzle after the second set of test chambers or so is going to test your ability to think creatively and use everything to your advantage. It's one of those experiences where you feel like you are somehow cheating the game when you are actually doing exactly what you are supposed to. This is all amplified tenfold by the fact that you have a partner to work with and share these experiences with, each new solution being an extreme emotional high and each massive blunder leading into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I think I will remember the co-op more fondly than the single player based solely upon the moments it allowed us to create.
It isn't even the fact that there are two sets of portals either that makes it so complex and mind-bending either, everything is just put to far better use. You do things in the co-op that seem absolutely mad if you have only played through the single player. For instance,
Maybe the most surprising thing about the co-op though is that is almost manages to pull off a Portal 1 again with it's story. The details in incredibly sparse, yet you feel almost immediately like there is something more going on. In a lot of ways, it shows how different Portal 2 is from the original. I'd almost go as far as to say that the co-op is a truer successor to the original game than the main campaign is. Once again, that isn't a bad thing, it's just different.
The pay-off at the end is pretty great too, and it certainly has a hell of a lot more impact on the Portal universe than the ending to the main game does. I'm actually incredibly surprised that people are still busy analyzing all the dialogue from the single player when the consequences of what the Co-op ending unleashes could cause an extremely drastic tonal shift in the next Portal game, assuming there is one.
I don't know, what do you guys think? I actually wouldn't mind at this point if the next Portal game were entirely multiplayer. It's just so god damn fun.
DLC cannot come fast enough.
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