Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Masterpiece"

Disclaimer: No amount of time was spent exploring online features.

Sam Neill's character Dr. Weir in the 1997 sci-fi horror film Event Horizon said it best. "The closest distance between two points is zero." Weir was basically describing a portal, where you bend space time until you have two points overlapping one another. Traveling through portals is exactly what the test subject in Portal was doing all the time, and instead of using a faster than light space ship, she had the simple convenience of shooting portals from a gun. Portal was slapped on Valve's Half-Life compilation pack as a free game, and it was played and love by many. A few years later, it sees a fully realized and fleshed out sequel, Portal 2.

The game begins with you waking up from cryogenic sleep. As you're coming to, your vital signs are checked and cognitive abilities monitored. An AI drone by the name of Wheatly greets you, and then out of nowhere, your room is shaken violently and the walls of your solitude are ripped apart, revealing a new reality. Wheatly urges you to follow him as he tries to guide you to safety, coming across a gun that fires portals along the way. Eventually, you come across a deactivated AI by the name of GLaDOS and by sheer dumb luck (i.e. stupidity), she's resurrected and mistakes you as her destroyer. She grabs you and flings you into a test chamber, and suddenly you find yourself solving one puzzle after another with the only tool at your disposal: a portal gun.

Portal 2 is one of those rare cases when a sequel not only gets everything right, but expands upon it a great deal further. Portal 2 brings the same basic gameplay of shooting portals on walls to get from point A to point B while also introducing one new gameplay mechanic after another. The Companion Cubes have returned, and a new cube that refracts lasers to power devices has been introduced. There are light walls used to create bridges and barriers to block off automated turrets, which also have returned for the sequel.

Just when you think you've seen all you can in Portal 2, the game shifts gears, introducing a new section of the lab and with it new devices. There are three different types of synthetic gel the player will come across. The blue gel lets the player bound off the surface to reach new heights. The orange gel accelerates your movement speed, and a white gel can be used to paint surfaces you wouldn't normally be able to shoot a portal on. There are also light tunnels that push you across a certain direction, and they can be used to cover incredibly wide gaps. All of these mechanics are introduced to you in a terrific pace, each one integrating with another, and they are used to create some pretty mind bending puzzles. You have to adjust your way of thinking and wrap your head in a different dimension to move past some of these test chambers.

What helps to further expand the Portal universe and create that much greater of a sequel is the further attention to atmosphere. The first Portal only really opened up at the very end of the game, but in Portal 2, there's a mix of sterile test chambers, the dark and dank bowels of Aperture Science Laboratorires, and then a lost and forgotten series of broken down test chambers connected by 50s style hallways and offices. GLaDOS isn't the only voice speaking to you this time around. When you reach these ancient test chambers, you'll constantly be greeted by the recordings of Cave Johnson, and you'll soon learn the connections of Aperature Laboratories and Black Mesa. Portal 2 feels much more alive than its predecessor thanks to all this.

And as such, the narration of the game still proves to be the series' strongest point. The writing is incredibly humorous, even more so than the first game. It's much more snarky and sarcastic, and with the help of the BBC Office's Stephen Merchant, Wheatly is a pure joy to listen to. The amount of hilarious things he utters is amazing, and many times you just want to remain idle to hear him keep saying new things. When you reunite with GLaDOS, you'll find that her hostility towards you gives her a more acerbic bite to her natural sarcasm. Cave Johnson's recordings are also a delight because his deliveries of the well-written dialogue is so spot on. Plus, the game's still full with funny signage to read, so always keep your eyes open.

The only real negative point of the game is a debatable one. Portal 2 seems to be a bit easier than the original game. The puzzles still require a good deal of analyzing, but the issue is in the game's inconsistency. You can spend a half hour trying to finger out one chamber, and then the next you'll have it solved almost immediately. For the most part, though, the difficulty curve is an easy one, just with a small number of spikes. The upside is that some of the puzzles are now so huge, looking around so much helps you to admire the sheer scope of the game. Some areas are so open, you can't even see where the rooms end.

Portal 2 is a stunning looking game. Although the textures aren't as high quality as some other 360 games, they are still excellent. The incredible lighting and attention to detail is what helps the game's aesthetics grab the eyes. The way the levels are built and how the environments transition from clean to dirty to rusted to overgrown with plant life helps Portal 2 become a beautiful game. The physics engine is also pretty impressive, and that's instantly notable in the game's opening moments as your habitat falls apart all around you. The only weak points of the game's graphics comes in the fluid. The murky water doesn't really look that realistic, especially when you fall through it, and the synthetic gels' splatter effects aren't nearly as convincing as the rest of the game's physics.

The game's audio is amazing, and it's the voice acting that really steals the show. Performances by Stephen Merchant as Wheatly, J.K Simmons as Cave Johnson and Ellen McClain returning as GLaDOS all make exemplary performances. The sound effects are pretty much the same as they were in the first Portal. The firing of the portal gun, the opening of the portals, the wooshing as you're flying through the air, all of it still sounds as it did before. The music is great to listen to. The soundtrack chimes in at key moments of the game, and since it's all composed electronically, it fits the science fiction atmosphere to a tee. The first Portal was known for its awesome end credits song, and Portal 2's closing theme is just as awesome.

It actually seems pretty easy to expect that the sequel to Portal, which also seemed like a mini-game versus a full complete game, would have been much better, but Valve made sure they didn't just do that by making the single player campaign longer. No, they touched upon every aspect that made the first great, and tweaked it to the point of perfection. They gave the game a bigger vision, filled it with more puzzle mechanics and wrote some of the best dialogue ever heard of in a game. If improving the single player wasn't enough, they also included an online co-op mode as well. Portal 2 simply isn't just a terrific sequel, but it's also one of the best games of the year. Portal 2 simply put is Valve's magnum opus.