Geekcape Games Reviews Portal 2 (Single Player)

This is going to be a rough one. The problem here is the best part of Portal 2 is the story. It truly is the prime focus on why you would want to buy it. So to sit here and point out as much about the story that I really liked as possible would probably just shaft whoever reads this. So I’m going to have to choose my words wisely and edit the crap out of this to ensure maximum non-spoiler-age. So lets see what GlaDOS has been up to this whole time.

Return to the Rabbit Hole

I played the original Portal a little late in the game. Luckily, it was one of the few games that was able to live up to the hype that was built up for me during its life in the market. I think I picked it up about a year after release and still enjoyed playing it. The puzzles weren’t necessarily hard at all. I never found myself stumped, but that was me. I heard it wasn’t much harder in Portal 2, and it really wasn’t. The eventual addition of new puzzle elements livened things up a little, but were normalized when I realized the almost mechanical and repeatable functions to them. Still though, had they not been there and if I was left with just the gun and some boxes, I wouldn’t have given Valve as much credit for pushing the FPS platform puzzler genre.

In terms of the game though, it flowed really well. One thing I tend to look out for with Valve now and days is the concept of visuals dominating the storyline. What visual elements were used? How did these play into the overall story? Did the color palettes add to or subtract from this feeling? This all started after going through the Team Fortress 2 levels and listening to all the production commentary. How much emphasis was put into the subtle-yet-not details of each level. I brought that mindset to Portal 2 due to my own personal branding of Valve’s creation process, and I felt it was a great start. You really do notice a lot more when taking these things into account. The whole sequence of events felt actively better when understanding how they looked and why.  Watching the testing facilities “regenerate” as GlaDOS brought them all back on line taking the lighting and foliage away from the back-to-nature feel they had and bring them to the cold and grey offices’ of science. Walking through what felt like a whole other era when you came up on the old Aperture Labs. Seeing the chaos over take the testing grounds. All these things made the game way more immersive, and the characters used to flesh out the whole thing were spot on with what the generally whimsical and still ominous world of Aperture needed.

Lets Meet the Cast

In the first game you are introduced to GlaDOS, yourself and whoever is going crazy and writing messages all over the facility’s underbelly. They added a few more names to that roster, and thankfully none of them were just filler. They all had a great amount of thought behind them. GlaDOS is back in all her insanity. The new guiding voice of Cave Johnson takes you on the tour of three different situations that Aperture went through in his life time. You get to see the evolution of the whole lab as it goes from stagnant to thriving. The comic voice of AI unit Wheatley breaking up what could have been more of the same without him. I don’t know how much further I want to go into this though. The story is driven strongly by the characters, and to bring up too much more could reveal major plot twists that were strewn about the story. Though I feel many of them were easy to call early for me, it made them no less brilliant. Definitely a story worthy of the cult following behind the Portal IP. It has the ability to be approached with fresh eyes, but you will most likely miss out on the “nostalgia” moments if you do, and if your thinking about getting both, just do it. The benefit to playing these two games in order is better than going back afterwards.

This is Still a Game

Story is all well and good, but past that this is, in fact, a game and should be held under that microscope as well. Currently I’ve completed both single and multiplayer all the way through. This has clocked me in at about 9 hours total for both. The single player alone took no more than 5 hours for me. In terms of gameplay I usually take offense to that. For $50 I’d at least expect the standard 8 hour core storyline. But with Portal 2 I honestly don’t know where I stand on this issue. On one hand it felt short, but on the other there was a lot of content stuffed into those hours. On one hand the platforming seemed dumbed down (for me this was due to the focus on cross platform), but on the other hand the additions made to the puzzle side of things refreshed the IP as opposed to rehashing it. Its just a tug-o-war as to whether or not I can definitively say if I felt the decisions made in this regard had merit. It kind of makes this a hard sell to me, though the cross-platform function seems to work wonders, and for that alone this could mean great things in the future in terms of inter-platform projects. I feel I will be in turmoil over this for a while as to whether or not I feel the story was enough to genuinely carry me through the lack of everything else.

Side Thoughts

Its always great to see Valve put out some more work, but in today’s gaming landscape there were still some things that left me wondering. In particular, the load times. Though I believe that there was some kind of grand scheme reason behind the need for this game to load as often as it does, I can’t help but take issue with it. Especially early on when I find myself tearing through the easier puzzles, it makes me cringe when I’m faced with a load screen every five minutes. That is really my biggest problem with Portal 2. It might be better if I knew why but until then I’ll just have to stay annoyed at every awful load screen breaking up what was otherwise a good experience.