When Valve released The Orange Box in 2007 I found myself equally excited for Portal as the collection’s other new offerings (Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2). The early trailers for Portal were unlike anything I had ever seen in a game and somehow managed to simultaneously be both funny and mind-bending. Does Portal 2 stand up to the original? Read on to find out.
In an immediate departure from the first, Portal 2 opens with a bang. I always felt the first Portal was very subdued, slow and methodical so the big, flashy opening of Portal 2 surprised me. Looking back, this bigger, louder opening sets the tone for the rest of the game. You’re still solving puzzles, but it feels like you’re somehow more active. Maybe it’s the bigger environments or the more talkative characters or the detailed scripting or the better animation, but Portal 2 just feels more grand.
Once I really got going, what stood out most was a certain feeling of doneness that Valve games typically have. During my entire play I only encountered one bug, which I caused trying to break a scripted event. Besides the single bug, Portal 2 is the most polished, finished feeling game I’ve played in years. There was no day-one patch fixing a dozen bugs like many games seem to do. True to Valve time, Portal 2 came out when it was ready and not a month before bug testing started.
I’m calling it right now: Cave Johnson, founder of Aperture Science, is going to be my favorite character of this year and he doesn’t even technically appear in the game. Those that do appear though, are excellent…all two of them. As a credit to Valve’s ability they managed to flip-flop, almost completely, my feelings for Wheatly and GLaDOS, where endearing love turned to anger for one, and anger to love for the opposite. It really is a love/hate with both of them; I could never really hate GLaDOS, nor Wheatly. Valve turns GLaDOS into a sympathetic character, and makes Wheatly into something to hate, which is not something that at the start of the game I thought was possible.
It’s hard to talk about Portal in any capacity without mentioning the humor. Portal 1, because of how short it was, meant Valve could squeeze in all their ‘A’ material and were extremely selective on what to include. Because of Portal 2’s longer length, it feels like the bar of quality for humor is lower. Portal 2 is funny, don’t get me wrong, but it felt like everything intended to be funny wasn’t always hysterical. Most of the humor got at least a chuckle out of me, but I wasn’t losing my mind at a consistent level of hilarity as with the first. It isn’t even what I’d consider “hit and miss”, as much as “hit and hitting not quite as hard”.
New to Portal 2 and absorbed from a team of college students who had a cool idea [Valve hired the indie developers who came up with the gel physics idea -Ed], there are different gels that alter how you get around. There’s blue gel for bouncing, orange gel for running and white gel for making a surface portal-able. They’re introduced in the later part of the game one by one and, as is typical of games, are eventually all used with each other and then used with the rest of the game’s elements in the final test chambers. These add a new layer of complexity to solving things, but a part of me feels that introducing these gels so late almost waters down the pure portal-driven puzzles of the first game. On the other hand, there’s only so much you can do with a single mechanic, and the gels add some welcome variety.
The story of Portal 1 was a little bare, and though there were a few twists in there (the biggest being the ending song, arguably) it was nothing like Portal 2’s near-constant twists. Each bit of story encountered is totally unexpected, and the plot as unpredictable as an unmedicated psychotic. In the first ten minutes of some games, you can tell exactly what the end entail. Portal 2 is the total opposite of that, led me around by the nose and kept me oblivious to what would happen next all the way through the end credits. To say this is an emotional rollercoaster is a tremendous compliment to rollercoasters everywhere.
The only majorly detrimental thing I can think of to say is that if you’re a stickler for getting the absolute greatest “value” from your game, specifically the highest number of hours of gameplay per dollar spent, Portal 2 is a bad investment. If you’re more concerned with quality however, you can’t go wrong with Portal 2. It’s the kind of game that you play through every year once the solutions to the puzzles fade from your mind. In a way Portal 2 is like a really fancy cup of coffee. There are cheaper, more cost efficient alternatives but they aren’t nearly as tasty or enjoyable. The price-per-ounce is greater than cheaper alternatives, but each ounce is worth the price, and tastes great too.
