Well its been awhile since Portal was released, and finally after delays we have been delivered Portal 2! It’s love is all I can say, well not really but that pretty much sums up the whole game. If you get done playing this thing and don’t love the witty humor, the characters, and the voice acting you have something wrong with you. The challenges are brought to you by a whole new dimension and we haven’t even started talking about the multiplayer yet! The feeling this game brings to you is to hard to explain to the uninformed. It’s just simply good.

“Oh, it’s you! It’s been a long time. How have you been? I’ve been really busy being dead… you know, after you murdered me.”

As you can see GlaDOS is still destroyed right where you left her from the first Portal. If you haven’t beat it yet I suggest you do first, however even if you haven’t played the first one this one pretty much clues you in on what’s going on, who you are and what part GlaDOS plays in this whole story. In fact the second one totally explains what Aperture Labs is….great for a  ’wrap up’ if you want to call it that. I’m not going to spoil the ending for you die hards. Either way GlaDOS is awake again and she isn’t happy—which is totally understandable considering our speechless hero, Chell played by you, murdered her.

As seen in the picture above you have a companion through some of the testing named Wheatley. The voice acting and comedy coming from this guy is done by Stephen Merchant from ‘The Office’. A bit of dry British humor along with flat out personality just oozes from this character.  However by the time you meet Wheatley alot has changed since you killed GlaDOS in the last version of Portal.

Now this is where things start to get interesting, the game essentially starts off with an average check up on the test subject only for you to go back to sleep and wake up, well more than a few years later. The lab is being rebuilt by by arms, and pneumatic pumps along with some guys like Wheatley. Vegetation has overgrown everything and the whole facility is in a state of emergency.

Grudges aside and from help from your new buddy, it’s time for the sake of science to start testing. The puzzles this time around, a complete battery at about 6-8 hours of gameplay for the single player, challenges your mind enough to make you think you are godly, but hint just enough to keep you from getting totally pissed off you can’t complete it. Just remember the saying, “think with portals”! It’s basically impossible to finish this game without a moment of silence for complete and utterly happiness in that you have accomplished something and leaves you with a feeling of just watching a great movie, storyline is awesome, and wanting to do it all over again to gain all the accomplishments that valvE has become famous for in the Steam platform.

Without ruining the story, I will tell you that you not only test through the chambers but also get outside the box a good bit, and even battle through the historic parts of Aperture Labs.  You also get to hear some history about it all as well as the founders voice, Cave Johnson. Some clues throughout the game on who you and others are, but yet another puzzle that you can solve. A journey through this area is really a refreshment and departure from GlaDOS’s clean cut sterile environment, and into Johnson’s macho manly testing where the typical rules were not expected to be followed and ultimately lead to…..oh wait you should play the game to find out!

So what about the mechanics? Well things have changed a bit this time around.

Well this first mechanic I think is underutilized in the game and would have loved about 10 more chambers with it. I’m sure the modders will have a field day with it. The gels, you end up with three total. The one pictured to the right is speed gel which makes you run super fast when you go through it. You also have blue gel which lets you bounce and the higher you fall on it the higher you bounce. And the last mysterious white gel, which really helps you. Am I going to tell you what it does? Nope and neither does the game, but just like any other puzzle in the game you will figure it out and when you do you will be happy you did.

GDC 2010 video not an actual level, but you get the idea.

On top of the gels you also get spring boards, or a more scientific sounding name is faith plates. Very fun and add in some really fun dynamics across the game.

A version of this level is in the game, not exactly though.

Of course you also have a mix of laser, mirror cubes, and the dynamics of all these added together. Its quite a journey and in my opinion not one to miss, but if you get done and feel you are left wanting more you have just about the same length of journey in the multiplayer! Or maybe it would be more effective to call it co-op than multiplayer because you are helping each other to get through the testing.

Here we have Atlas, the ball, and P-body. The amount of laughs you get off their animations and being able to kill your buddy because he ‘trusts’ you is worth the cost of admission. The multiplayer is a GREAT addition to the game and is a totally different game, you and a buddy, or a random person from the internet go through about 20+ levels solving it all, it’s a good side story in which explains why you keep seeing these guys throughout the game. It also gives you a chance to solve some harder challenges.

However I do have so nags about the game, nothing that affects the way I fell about the end product but merely a suggestion for valvE. For instance in the multiplayer there should have at least been one really huge room with all the different obstacles and tools to allow you to play with the mechanics of Portal. It would be rightly fun, and talking with another player the other day was something that is sorely missed even though it hasn’t been given.

Another suggestions would be to add in a few challenge levels on the multiplayer. Where you have 5 or so challenges that can be accomplished maybe 3 different ways each with a combination of all the tools available. Then make a timed speed race type of setting. Use the rock paper scissors, yes you can play that in multiplayer, to pick who goes first!

The biggest gripe of them all…..the missing levels that have been shown to use over the last year. They have made comments that the play testers got too frustrated or simply couldn’t figure out how to solve those levels. You already made them, so why not include them, if anything, as bonus levels for us who love the challenge and pheen off having those options. Another thing would be the ‘store’ to buy more stupid shit like TF2 has, with hats and animations. Honestly why not just include those. I’m die hard and will not buy animations to ‘impress’ my friends online. You should have just given us those. To have $80-90 of DLC available on the day of release is astonding. I think I would have waited for awhile before I published those even if I already had them, or maybe you should have just gave us the option to MP skin our guys for free, you know, like every other game. I understand the ones you are selling can be seen by the other person in MP but they could have been transfered between computers just as easily.

Either way awesome game, great job valvE, thanks to Ducky who helped me play through the multiplayer…..and guys if you want one of the best games of the year the time is now, if you haven’t already gotten it. I don’t do ‘ratings’ generally I either like it or I don’t, but if I had a 10 star system I would go to the Spinal Tap reference and say, this goes to an 11!

One of the major things