The first Portal, released in 2007 as part of the Orange Box, was a short, ingenious puzzler wrapped up in first-person-shooter mechanics, underpinned by a darkly comic story about scientific research taken to dangerous extremes. The game seemed like lightning in a bottle and a sequel sounded unnecessary. Still, Valve has managed to go one better than what its team created before, and then built on its impressive foundations.
Portal 2 kicks off with player waking up in the Aperture Laboratories, the human behavior research facility from the first game, and finding out very quickly that things have gone haywire. Aperture is a wreck: without GlaDOS – Portal 1's female AI antagonist – to run things, the facility is in an advanced state of disrepair. Walls are crumbling, test chambers malfunction and every room the player moves through is riddled with smashed windows, natural overgrowth and broken machinery. In the opening stages of the game, players are introduced to Wheatly, a stammering, motor-mouthed droid voiced by Stephen Merchant, and reacquainted with the Portal Gun, which creates interconnecting portals capable of bending distances, and physics, in their environment.
They're also soon reunited with GlaDOS, who takes umbrage at their presence and decides that a new round of potentially lethal tests is in order.
While the set-up will sound incredibly familiar to Portal veterans, Portal 2 is hardly a retread of the first game. Yes, using the Portal Gun to navigate one's way through every new environment is the core premise of the game – and cubes, gun turrets, floating platforms and pressure pads all make a return. But Valve has added some mind-bending mechanics and tools to the mix.
As the player advances through the Apeture Labs they're introduced to new items that the research facility has created to exercise their grey matter and potentially kill them off. There are Hard Light Bridges, which can create walkways or block off the sensors of lasers and gun turrets. There are Aerial Faith Plates, which fling the player through the air. There's Propulsion Gel, which allows them to zoom across the floor, building momentum for jumps and portal leaps. Puddles of Repulsion Gel can create areas the player can bounce on– and the higher the ledge they drop from, the higher they'll fly through the air. White Gel can be sprayed on to surfaces to make them Portal Gun-friendly. Excursion funnels are blue tubes of anti-gravity, which gently transport the player from one end of the map to the other, and they too can be redirected and repositioned with the Portal Gun. Each new item is introduced gently, to let the player become familiar with its capabilities, and then Valve starts ramping up the difficulty.
The puzzle rooms are incredibly well designed in that there's no hard and fast rule with the game's difficulty curve. Once the tutorials are out of the way, it's down to every individual player's desire to break the code on each environment, which allows them to move from the entrance to the exit. Even if one player finds the solution to one particular room obvious, this doesn't mean that everyone else will, and some puzzles may take up to hour to solve. All the while GlaDOS pours scorn over the player's efforts, with a stream of insults that are petty, vindictive and immature – made more hilarious by her robotic, sing-song voice.
The humour in Portal 2 is another trump card in the game's well-paced, engrossing and unsettling story. Without giving too much of the game's plot away, the player will find Portal 2 funny throughout, but also faintly spinechilling. GlaDOS and Wheatly are by turns funny and monstrous and the Aperture Labs take on an increasingly oppressive atmosphere as the player ventures deeper into the facility, learning more about its origins. Meanwhile, the unseen character from the first Portal is still lurking behind the scenes, scrawling paranoid messages and horrific cartoons on the walls.
The game's main campaign is longer than in Portal 1, and arguably better too. Once that's over and done with, however, players can return to Aperture in the multiplayer. This mode is a standalone story starring two cute droids, Atlas and Peabody, who are sent testing by GlaDOS, and the series of puzzles they have to navigate depends on them working successfully as a team. While it may sound strange that a game offering such a successful solitary experience as Portal should include such a mode, it's actually delightful fun. Once again, the puzzles are well-balanced and brilliantly constructed and, GlaDOS has a new collection of insults.
Valve has created a masterpiece in Portal 2. The depth of content, the mind-bending mechanics and fantastic experience are almost certain to satisfy ardent fans of the first game; and to all newcomers to the series, it's as simple as this: prepare to have your mind blown. Over and over again.
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