Portal 2 was a favorite of one my best friends in high school, and it's something her and I played a lot together. My brother and I played through the co-op campaign (his first time, but a replay for me) a few years back, but it's been at least five years since I've played through the single player story. This month's "2011 Retro" theme gave a great excuse to go back down memory lane to being in high school again XD. It took me about 5.5 hours to play through the English version of the game in one sitting.
Portal 2 starts sorrrta where the original leaves off, but much later. Chell's failed escape from Aperture Labs put her back into deep cryo sleep in the hibernation facilities, and it's been a LONG time since then. She's awoken by a strange AI robot called Wheatly who needs her help to try and escape the facility which is now totally falling apart ever since Chell decommissioned Glados who knows how long ago. Unfortunately for them, they end up accidentally waking Glados back up, causing a whole new wave of testing and life-threatening turmoil. The story holds up a lot better than I thought it might. To a certain point I'm not sure if the humor is just that 2011 or if I just associate it so much with high school that this just IS humor from that era for me, but I still liked it XD. The back and forth between Glados and Wheatly (who is still charmingly as ever voiced by Stephen Merchant) and Cave Johnson's antics are still wonderfully entertaining. I'd also never really thought before about any kind of messaging in the story of Portal 2 before, and this gave me a really good chance to reassess that. Portal 2 is mostly a sort of silly comedy on top of a character study, and it doesn't shove any messaging in your face particularly hard, but it's a nice story about how monstrous people don't make themselves: monstrous systems push them into being that way. The gameplay is still that Portal excellence with some new toys added in for more puzzle fun. A first person puzzle game in the Source Engine (and my god was it a nostalgia trip playing a Source Engine game again after so long XD) where left click shoots one end of a portal, and right click fires the other end. You still have blocks to weigh down buttons and turrets to try and kill you like in the first game, but this game also adds in things like pressure plates that fling you across the map, light-bridges that can also be redirected through portals, tube-like gravity fields to push you (and objects) around via portals, and also weird goo that can be used to make floors bouncy or make you run faster on them. Every new mechanic feels like it's used in a way that never outstays its welcome, and the puzzle design is top notch as ever. I can definitely see the argument that Portal 2's puzzles are ultimately a bit more lackluster than the original's (given how excellently the original nails the "short but sweet" aspect of its level/puzzle designs), but I'd also put forward that Portal 2's single-player puzzles are ultimately just a training ground for the co-op mode's puzzles. The co-op mode's puzzles are also excellent but much harder given how much more you have to work with when operating with two sets of portals rather than just one. The presentation is as wonderful as ever as well. The white and greys of the fixed, modern Aperture Labs look cold and forboding as ever, and are foiled nicely by the decaying and aging facilities both in the newer and older parts of the lab. The music, while often subdued, is also excellent (and given how much my best friend in high school loved those tracks, they were also a hell of a nostalgia trip for me). Verdict: Highly Recommended. Portal 2 is still an excellent time all these years later. The humor and puzzles have held up very well, and if you somehow haven't played it yet, it's still very much something worth checking out. Though we've had a few more first-person puzzle games come and go since Portal and its sequel, nothing is really quite like Portal 2 (particularly the co-op mode), and Portal 2's level of quality gives a good indication as to why that might be.
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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