A little late, I realize, but I had to finish college before playing this amazing game. So, read as you will. 

I think that Portal 2's greatest adversary is Portal, or at least the perception of the first game.  Let me talk about that perception and what I think (hereafter considered "The Truth"). Portal and Portal 2 are great because they set expectations, reverse them, and are still true to themselves. 

Okay, heady analysis incoming. 

What Portal Did

In Portal, assuming you as a player have no knowledge of the game's nature before playing it, you are expecting a puzzle game with a nifty looking portal gun. GLaDOS slowly reveals herself, through her inability to hide her maliciousness in her warnings and mind games, as an antagonist. Valve's trademark pathing leads you to hidden recesses where the rat man and his foreboding artwork appears. 

And all this happens while you do what you expected (as you said): use portals, buttons, moving platforms, opening doors, disintegration fields, cubes, and energy orbs, slowly introduced and combined, to move through spaces. You, and Chell, move from willing test subject, to wary test subject, to revolutionary without a means to fight, to revolutionary ironically empowered as GLaDOS thinks she has won, to vanquisher of evil. No one tells you how to feel, but you do feel. 

However, the puzzles are only minorly dynamic with the story. Think about it. If we consider the escape sequence to be Chell acting of her own accord with her own goal (destroy GLaDOS and/or escape), then only the most rudimentary of the skills in the test chambers themselves are useful in this sequence. Most prominent in the escape is the new "rocket" tool. Otherwise, you are simply placing portals where the walls allow you to (see escape sequences in Portal 2), timing mechanical crushers, and occasionally using the "momentum fling" move.  

The tests, then, are complicated in a way the escape never is, and that is exactly the point. GLaDOS, as shown more clearly in Portal 2, is frustrated by your continued success at her tests, so she tries to throw you off. But, in all honesty, playing Portal again recently, the final puzzles are not all that difficult, no matter the crazy solutions people have devised. I think this is somewhere people look back on Portal with rose-tinted glasses. It was not and is not a difficult game. Its most challenging puzzles were outside the narrative as DLC. The game itself is remarkable for its teaching rather than its difficulty.   Portal can be conquered by basically anyone because the game so acutely teaches the player how to think with portals. You conquer GLaDOS because Valve helps you to do so. Your only adversary is your own intuition about what to do next, an obstacle which Valve helps you overcome. Great players can do what Valve does not expect. But non-geniuses like me can play the game as Valve expected, and the enjoy the hell out of it. 

The genius of Portal is twofold. It has mechanical genius. The portal concept is cool. It's new, it's fun, it feels free but is actually astutely restrained. The traditional placing things on button and platforming across moving platforms mechanic become invigorated with the addition of portals. It also has storytelling genius, adding a malevolent air to the tests and the AI, an absurdism to kind turrets, and a fascination to behind the scenes details. Portal 2 is better.

This game is kinda shite. As demonstrated in the GB Quick Look, seeing other players is a fun game of assumptions and firing at everything that moves until a blue triangle appears. Shooting does not feel awful, but does alternate between terrible accuracy and seemingly ineffective bullets. There are five maps. They either feel too empty or like one cannot move without being shot from some unseen corner.  Around once per two games, the server decides that I simply do not deserve to live and kills me as I spawn, often removing my hard-earned weaponry from the last few lives. 
  
And yet, I've spent untold hours playing this. I've got my dot sight on my MP5 and a silencer on my pistol. I can pretty consistently finish near the top of the leader board.  I'm not only playing this quite a bit, but also getting good at it.  
 
The game is a crib sheet mash up of Counterstrike and Call of Duty. Its accumulate cash with each kill that you can use to purchase better weapons and equipment gambit system is straight out of the former. Its get points per each kill that unlock new upgrades and weapons for your arsenal mechanic is a sad mockery of Call of Duty's multiplayer genius.  
 
But, yo, it costs 8 bucks.  
 
I'm not a shooter man by trade. I can play and do well enough at them. I've beaten the first two Killzones and Resistances. I love me some Half-Life 2. I've dabbled in Halo. I beat COD 4: Modern Warfare. But that's all single player. And I don't own any of them.  
 
I own Modern Combat: Domination. Or, at least, I own in as we own digital things nowadays.  
 
It may be a sad mockery of far better concepts in far better games. But, damnit, its low price somehow makes it okay. It's like seeing a dumb action flick only after the ticket price is low enough.  
 
As much as I'd like to say that all that I consume is high quality art, in reality something can be kinda shite and I'll buy it if it's cheap. I fear what will happen when I get a phone with an App store. 

The Saboteur creates a somewhat contradictory tone. As the foul-mouthed, balls to the wall Irishman Sean Devlin, you kill Nazis with a smile, terrorize Parisians with the sloppy car physics, and generally create mayhem. Sure, you're doing it for some ill-conceived revenge because Sean didn't care a like about the Nazis until they tortured and killed his friend, but, mostly, the actual gameplay is an adrenaline-fueled romp.  
 
And that gameplay is remarkably enjoyable. Explosions are easy to pull off yet satisfying in their execution. On normal, killing hundreds of Nazis is easy, yet its arcadey feel makes that just fine. Even the stealth, something that could have been messy and awkward, is built upon elegant representational systems of suspicion that never feel realistic, but are fun.  
 
So, when you walk up to a priest sitting in one of the booths of the Moulin Rouge-esque club full of scantily clad (or nude if you bought the game unlike me who rented it) women, you expect to continue in this tonal vein. Then he spins his tale: 
 
Sean, he says, I have a man who confesses to me each week. He confesses that he is a Nazi informant, that his words have killed many people. "He asks for my forgiveness, but I  am afraid do not have any more to give." 
  
Sean pledges to kill the cocksucker, or something to that extent. At the priest's behest, he climbs up a church, grabs a sniper rifle, and waits for the priests signal as sinners come to repent. As a man approaches with an umbrella, a man who looks much like any other, the priest screams out something about the sword of God striking down the wicked, Sean shoots the penitent, and then has the easy task of escaping a small red circle of Nazi alarm.  
 
I wonder at the meaning of all of this. Questions it raises for me include: 
 
1. If the priest is a man of peace, a man who is ordained not only not to judge, but to relieve men of God's judgment if they openly confess their sins, is this act a rejection of his religion, his station, and his responsibility? 
 
2. The man clearly feels guilty for his betrayals. He confesses them. He knows they are wrong. Is this worse than a man who kills out ignorance or hatred? Or is it proof that, rather than a swift bullet to the head, he is truly deserving of a second chance in the resistance itself where he will be protected against the Nazi influence that seems to have driven him to such evils.  
 
3. This mission seems like a story someone would tell in a Spielberg film, a moral dilemma indeed. What the hell is it doing in The Saboteur? I love that a game is making me ponder so deeply, but this all feels somehow worse since it's located in this jocular game and since Sean doesn't ponder it for a second.  
 
The Saboteur is not about choices. But I do wish I could have chosen to do something different in this mission. 

Ludonarrative dissonance is a big phrase for when game mechanics and systems interfere or clash with the storytelling in a game. I think Enslaved suffers from this in a rather unfortunate capacity, which is one of the reasons it did not resonate for me much.  
 
Two Examples 
 
1. The Shiny Bits 
 
Ninja Theory strives to explain every bit of gameyness--health bars, RPG advancement, even menus--with in-game reasons. Monkey can only see all this stuff, including helpful objective markers and enemy weaknesses, because Trip's slave crown is broadcasting it into his brain.  
 
But, when the game begins, Monkey is free of this device. Yet every pipe, every metal crag he can jump to is shining like the dickens. There is no explanation for this. It's pure, obvious, THIS IS A GODDAMN VIDEO GAME in your face. That kinda sucks.  
 
2. The Experience Bits 
 
Throughout Enslaved, Monkey acquires energy that he can use to upgrade. Sometimes it's sprinkled in the environment; all the time it's coming from enemies.  
 
But it is never explained. There isn't even a throwaway line, like the mundane, "oh, looks like the energy of former mechs is floating about because that's just what energy does nowadays," or the tragic, "every floating energy sphere is where a person died in the war." Nothing.  
 
Worse, the experience bits make you actively look at environments for WHERE'S THE SHIT? instead of a more Half-Life 2, what happened here? how did it happen? what kind of stories can this place tell me? 
 
That is poor, lazy, destructive design.  
 
The Ending 

Hello lone visitor or massive hoard, welcome to my unlikely to be too exciting blog. After years of Gamespot fandom followed by the traditional move to GiantBomb followed by more years of bombcast listening, video watching, and review reading, I felt a moral duty to the good people of this site and all the Whiskey Media brand to subscribe and sign on when given the chance. I don't regret it.  
 
I think we all know that GiantBomb is special. The personalities here manage to elegantly balance style and irreverence with quality criticism. The website is a brilliant concoction of wikis, quests, and easy to use tools. And the video content is bar none the best on the internet, with high production values, higher creativity, and a group of guys that can easily be called the video game equivalent of MST3K/Rifftrax. I've even shown some of the more hilarious quicklooks to non-gaming friends and they laughed just as hard as I do.  
 
So, now I'm here, trying to balance this with senior year of college, and having a blast. You'll likely see me bringing some philosophy into mundane conversation, but I ultimately just want what we all do--for games to be a substantive part of my life just like other media. See you around.