Portal 2 Review

Written 04/27/2011

Note: This review is for the PC version of the game. Screenshot and video taken from my machine.

Back in 2007, everyone interested in Half-Life 2 more than likely picked up the Orange Box. It was an amazing deal, and still is. Not only did you get the amazing Half-Life 2 and its two additional episodes, but also Team Fortress 2 and a little thing called Portal. By far the shortest game of the collection, Portal also managed to be the most influential; becoming a gaming pop-culture icon almost overnight. Now three and a half years later we find ourselves back in Aperture Laboratories trying to escape from GLaDOS, and by extension science, yet again. Can this new effort hope to compare with the original?

Visuals and Presentation

Considering that Valve took its sweet time developing Portal 2, like the rest of their games, they have made substantial improvements to the admittedly dated Source engine over Left 4 Dead 2 (which, if memory serves me well, is Valve’s most recent release prior to Portal 2). The lighting is where most of the improvements can be seen by far, with dramatic and accurate shadows, better dynamic lighting, and the ability to transition between outdoor, dirty lighting and clean, indoor laboratory lighting perfectly. Texture resolution and detail have also been noticeably improved, and pull attention away from the fact that many of the environments are quite blocky in their design. The fact that the game is set in a massive laboratory, and that scientists in general aren’t very aesthetically creative means that this blockyness is actually quite accurate to the setting, and thus excusable. A great deal of effort was also put into making everything look and feel like it’s been through a large and recent disaster, and it shows. You really get a sense of the destruction and emptiness as you make your way through Aperture Laboratories and watch as it attempts to rebuild itself.

You also find yourself outside of the laboratory proper and visiting other places in the area. This is a huge and welcome change from the original Portal, in which you were trapped in the laboratory building for the entire game. Although few compared to most games, the models and animations all enjoy an equal amount of improvement both technically and visually. Overall, this is a much needed and very well executed upgrade to the Source engine’s visuals!

Visuals and Presentation Rating:

Sound

Portal’s writing and voice acting were easily its strongest points when it came to audio, whereas music was mostly nonexistent. In Portal 2, the writing somehow managed to get even better, the voice acting kept the smiles and laughs coming, and the music helped you think most times, and totally rocked the rest of the times. I really have nothing bad to say about the audio here, everything truly is great. That’s not my Valve bias talking here either. Take the time and listen to all of the ear candy Portal 2 offers, and I promise you won’t be disappointed!

Sound Rating:

Gameplay

The biggest thing that made Portal so unique was your portal gun. It allowed you to create holes through which you could bypass unmovable obstacles, travel great distances in a millisecond, and control the laws of physics itself. It was your only tool, your only weapon, and your only trusted companion. It was invaluable, and forced you to think beyond the norm. It forced you to think with portals.

Not only must you think with portals in Portal 2, but now also faith plates (basically directional jump pads), bridges made out of pure light, zero-G funnels, lasers, cubes that redirect lasers, and three different types of gel that allow you to solve puzzles in bizarre and creative ways. If you thought thinking only with portals was hard, these additions will likely melt your brain into an unrecognizable puddle of goo! Granted though, these new resources can only be manipulated using the portal gun, so it’s still fairly accurate to say you’re thinking with only portals. To control where a light bridge or zero-G funnel is pointing, change them with correctly placed portals. Need to get that gel spread across the room? Shoot a portal under the gel fountain and another on the wall and watch everything in the line of fire get painted.

Speaking of gels, there are three varieties, blue, orange, and white. The blue gel will bounce you off of any surface it is on with the same momentum at which you hit it. For example, if you need to jump very high, but there are no available places to use portals, jump from a high ledge and land on some blue gel. You will be bounced back up as high as where you originally jumped from, and be able to still maintain enough control of your movement to land on the tall platform across the room. Is there a massive gap between you and your goal, and no way to build up enough momentum to use the blue gel? Coat the orange gel over the floor and an incline, and you will run extremely fast whenever you are on the gel. Combine the orange gel with cleverly placed portals, and you can vault yourself just about anywhere; even straight up! The white gel allows you to create portals wherever it’s spread, and is extremely useful toward the end of the game, where fewer and fewer surfaces are portal-friendly.

Because of all these new options, the campaign’s difficulty ramps up a great deal and can range from simple to extreme. If you thought only managing two portals is confusing though, try Portal 2’s co-op campaign, where the puzzles are so difficult that it takes two people with individual portal guns to complete. At first things are simple enough, and teach you the basic mechanics of co-op play like how to indicate where you want your partner to shoot a portal, set a countdown so you can both sync your actions, and perform team emotes like high-fiving, hugging, and playing rock-paper-scissors. Once the difficulty ramps up in co-op, the puzzles can be demonically hard. I played the entire co-op campaign with my cousin (who you may remember from my Amnesia review), and some of the puzzles stumped us both for over half an hour. It was that difficult, and neither of us are slouches when it comes to Portal. When we did manage to complete the co-op campaign, we were treated to a very nice cutscene and credits sequence. It was like we had just finished a completely separate game, and was a very nice touch. Overall, Portal 2’s gameplay is more difficult, fun, and rewarding than the original!

Gameplay Rating:

Story

Portal 2’s story starts not very long after the first game’s ending. I’m reluctant to reveal the first game’s ending for the simple fact that it’s so integral to Portal 2’s entire story, and is revisited very often. I will say though, that if you haven’t played the first game to completion (why not?! It’s only like 3 hours long!) you will likely be fairly lost as to what’s going on. Other than that, Portal 2’s story is very witty, and has a constant stream of humor coming at you that never gets old. Sometimes the jokes can be a bit corny, but that cornyness actually manages to add to the game’s overall charm. The pacing stays pretty strong until the middle of the game, where the momentum peters out temporarily, then comes back strong soon after and remains until the game’s conclusion. I can’t really say anymore without giving away some pretty major spoilers, but I will say that if you enjoyed the original Portal’s story to any degree, you will enjoy Portal 2’s ten times more.

Story Rating:

Replay Value

Portal 2’s replay value is the weakest point in an otherwise stellar package. The campaign will take you anywhere between 9-12 hours to complete, and the co-op campaign will take between 6-8 hours depending on your partner’s competency and how well you work together. That’s really quite a bit of gameplay time considering that the original Portal was only 3 hours long max. The problem is that once you finish both campaigns there’s nothing else to do. So unless you want to play the same, though great, content again and again, there’s really little to no replay value. When Valve releases the mod tools for Portal 2 though, that will no longer be an issue as there will likely be a staggering amount of user created maps and mods for both singleplayer and co-op. I can’t wait for that!

Replay Value Rating:

Final Thoughts and Overall Score

Games like Portal 2 are why I love Valve so much. Not only can they make tired genres come alive again with Half-Life 2, they have made a multiplayer game easily playable by the masses with Team Fortress 2, and a co-op experience like no other with Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. If that isn’t enough, they are not afraid to be completely different and give us gems like Portal and Portal 2. Thanks Valve, you guys rock! Portal 2 is available for PC, Mac, PS3, and 360. As a final note, the PC and PS3 versions of the game can play the co-op campaign with each other. So it’s entirely possible for you to be playing on your PC and have a partner on their PS3, and vice versa.

Portal 2 Overall Score:

PC System Requirements

• OS: Windows 7 / Vista / XP
• Processor: 3.0 GHz P4, Dual Core 2.0 (or higher) or AMD64X2 (or higher)
• Memory: 1GB XP / 2GB Vista
• Hard Disk Space: At least 7.6 GB of Space
• Video: Video card must be 128 MB or more and should be a DirectX 9-compatible with support for Pixel Shader 2.0b (ATI Radeon X800 or higher / NVIDIA GeForce 7600 or higher / Intel HD Graphics 2000 or higher).
• Audio: DirectX 9.0c compatible 

Mac System Requirements

•  OS: MAC OS X 10.6.7 or higher
• Processor: Intel Core Duo Processor (2GHz or better)
• Memory: 2GB
• Hard Disk Space: At least 7.6 GB of Space
• Video: ATI Radeon 2400 or higher / NVIDIA 8600M or higher / Intel HD Graphics 3000