Portal 2 Review (PS3)

More dimension-twisting buffoonery from Valve!

OK, so I�m starting with an explanation: you�ve seen my score, and your blood is boiling because you disagree. To those who think I�ve marked it too low, it is a great game, but not quite the Game of the Year everyone is screaming about at the mo. More on my reasons below. To those who think I�ve scored it too high (you know, those posting 0 scores on aggregate sites), get off your spam box, cos you probably agree with me but are taking it too far. You spanner.

Anyways.

Portal 2 has arrived, amid massive waves of hype, some controversy, and a cheeky price drop at retail to bump sales a touch further over the sunny Easter weekend. Chell, GLaDOS, portals and puzzles are all back in bigger form than the awesome Orange Box filler we all adore, and gamers on PC, Xbox and PS3 now have co-op play and far more story to sink their teeth into. Rat Man, mental songs, brilliant characters and the history of Aperture all appear here, and about 7 hours of seriously clever adventure await the intrepid. Just pick up the portal gun and step into the test chamber…

If the last paragraph was sheer gibberish to you, don�t worry. Portal 2 is a First-Person platform puzzler, involving a variety of improbable science toys and dramatic testing zones designed to get you thinking. You begin with a portal gun, which fires two different coloured doorways onto any specially built surface which you can then traverse instantaneously. So, if you fired both portals on opposite sides of a wall, you could effectively walk through it. Now apply simple physics (mass, velocity, weight, etc.) to the process, and you are getting an idea of what to expect. The world of Portal is a testing zone known as Aperture Science Laboratories, and was overseen by an evil AI known as GLaDOS, who mercilessly (and hilariously) taunted the protagonist, Chell, until she was finally destroyed at the end of the first game.

I still thoroughly enjoyed every minute of Chells newest adventure

So, Portal 2 fires off where the first ended. It�s some time later, and Chell has somehow been recaptured and is awakened in a strange room by Wheatley, a small robotic eyeball with a very simple AI installed. In case you hadn�t read it somewhere already, Wheatley is an absolute hoot. Voiced by Stephen Merchant, he�s a good natured, but very dumb, chattery little robot who gives you some advice whilst talking total rubbish (which happens to be some of the funniest dialogue ever found in a videogame). He�s brilliant, and a great companion through the game, as Chell plows her way through the decrepit Aperture facility.

You see, the facility has been left to wrack and ruin since the last game, and is now in dire need of a makeover. Initial test chambers are broken up versions of the early test chambers of the original game, before becoming newer puzzles in rooms which appear to fix themselves before your eyes. However, the puzzling still works the same: there is a door, and often some switches to be pressed to open it. However, going about this is Portal�s biggest plus point: utilising all kinds of toys and tricks, from light bridges and laser beams to bouncy gel and weighted boxes. And the puzzles are, quite simply, absolutely brilliant, getting that perfect balance of seeing what to do, and not quite knowing how to go about it.

Visually, the Source engine looks great for a 7 year old bit of technology: light bounces and glows beautifully, graphic definition is sharp and strong, and everything has a very solid feel to it. And, as alluded to before, the sound is brilliant too: voice acting is amazing, and ambient sound often unobtrusively builds to a full background tune as you subtly plough through a puzzle. It�s a very impressive achievement to make the music actually part of the game so effectively, and hats off to the audio team for such a great job.

So, on to co-op, and despite not being able to test online play (thanks to some bloody irritating hacker pillocks pulling a DDoS attack on Sony – don�t they realise that they hurt ordinary people far more than the corporations they have a beef with?), the game features offline co-op too, which the wife and I duly had a play at. And, I can honestly say that the co-op is even more fun than the single player – taking place straight after the events of Portal 2, two players have a portal gun each and set off to solve a hoard of puzzles specially designed to bicker over.

It�s bloody brilliant – four portals allows for even more mental thinking,. where one player might control the portals as the other needs to watch for the buttons to press as they fly off at weird angles. But Valve know the true secrets of good co-op is in the little things, and have added gestures (such as waving or high fiving), and basic straightforward mean behaviour. Imagine if you will, your friend is waving at you – well, open up a portal under that sucker, launch him into a pit of oblivion and laugh maniacally in his face. He�ll respawn shortly, so no worries, except for the deep wounding of pride that goes with such a pratfall.

So, it�s got a great story, clever puzzles, it�s well priced, and the co-op is great, so why is it “only” getting an 8? Well, firstly, 8 is still a very good score, and it�s still a very good game. However, the joy of Portal is in figuring out the puzzles, and obviously you can only do this once per puzzle, so replayability is a bit of an issue. Co-op allays this somewhat, but the same issue resurfaces once you beat co-op as well. Secondly, the hype for this title hopes to cover some of the biggest flaws – for all the new tricks and toys, Portal 2 still plays very much like the original, and as such can at times be too easy. Valve try to hide this with some impressively huge locales, but the bottom line is that the game gets easier and easier as it goes on. Add into this the fact that it�s really actually not that big in terms of length, and there is some justification to the lower price. It�s all over a little too quickly, and then leaves too little to bring you back. There�s also a lot less of the little hidden extras, like the Rat Man rooms, which created a secondary world within the game – something that could have really pushed Portal 2 into true greatness.

But, for all it�s foibles, it�s still a really good game. PS3 gamers also get Steam integration, and I have to also give a big thumbs up to Valve for including a Portal 2 PC access key in the box – as soon as PSN is back up, I�ll be playing with some of my old PC gaming mates to check it out there too. I still thoroughly enjoyed every minute of Chells newest adventure, really loved the story (which I have purposely not referenced here, as it is best experienced first hand), and highly recommend for most gamers. Just be prepared for it maybe being a little less great that many would have you believe…..

Silver Y Award

4 / 5