Continuing my current journey through the unexplored world of PC gaming, we get to my review of Portal 2, which I finished a few weeks ago. It was truly a wonderful experience, and now I am planning on picking up two series on which I always had some interest in: Bioshock and Mass Effect. In fact, I have already ventured into the former by beating the first game today, and I am getting ready to start the sequel before I can dive into the world of Mass Effect - I decided to leave that series for later due to its huge world and immense value, opposed to Bioshock's relatively short duration. Anyway, feel free to skip this wal of text, but please recommend it if you enjoy it!

Warning! Huge Review Approaching!

Some games seem to be happy with having one single prowess, Portal 2 is always looking for a new way to amaze

The original Portal was one of those games that sneaks up on the world and that, benefited by its low-key arrival, managed to positively shock everybody who played it and cause a lasting impression. Seen at first as a curious bonus to a gaming package that included Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, Portal ended up stealing the show, pretty much like that daring supporting actor whose performance steals the spotlight from the leading star and changes the gravity center of the movie. On the surface, Portal was a unique puzzle game whose immediately noticeable quirk was its first-person view – a characteristic that is very unusual to the genre – and the use of a weapon as a tool for riddle-solving; however, once players had just gotten comfortable with the game's progression, Valve turned the title on its very head by revealing that its maze of white-walled rooms was the simply the fancy topping hiding one of then most amazingly engaging and disturbing plots to ever reach a videogame. When some games seem to be satisfied with packing one single innovative and surprising twist – that is, if they even manage to come up with one such feature - Portal had two hidden punchlines to leave games dazed with awe.

Portal 2, therefore, was a project born with two daunting tasks already lying in front of itself. For starters, it would have to be at least as good as its predecessor, after all, now that the game would be standing on its own, instead of being joined by two well-established games, hype dictated that it would need to be a bigger and better version of Portal. Secondly, the surprise aspect of being a clever puzzle game with a mesmerizing plot would now be expectation and not a delicious extra. However, against all odds and carried by a company that is arguably one of the best at what it does, Portal 2 excels in the areas first explored by its older brother and soars high in its larger scope and more ambitious storytelling in order to solidify itself as one of the best videogames of the past few years. In face of the danger of being qualified as a pretentious take on an otherwise minimalistic idea, Portal 2 winds up being the full realization of what the original Portal might have been if it wasn't a toy project of a bunch of very talented young developers with a lot of courage, little common sense and a lot of bright ideas.

In the end of Portal, Chell, our female protagonist, is last seen fallen in the wreckage of the facility she just destroyed. Portal 2 kicks off in the same mysterious and anguishing way that its predecessor started, with a dizzy character waking up to some radio announcement in a tidy room, and before you have time to blink, the realization that you are back in the same doomed place you fought so hard to escape strikes. As despair is taking over, you remember that GLADOS – the source of evil of this cursed place – is now a giant piece of metal scrap, and things start getting even better when you are greeted by Wheatley, a clumsy friendly robot with a wonderful British accent, an incredible ability to deliver hilarious lines and a plan to get you out of your room and to a safe place. Quickly, as exploration begins, Chell will notice that things are different, as it is clear much time has passed and vegetation has now grown into the partially destroyed facility. The sailing goes quite smoothly until Wheatley's uncanny talent of making the wrong decision at the worst possible times awakens an even more furious GLADOS that then proceeds to show all of her deep love for the person that murdered her not too many years ago by tossing Chell into another set of test chambers. And Portal 2 starts looking a whole lot like Portal.

Everyone who played the original will know what to do from the get go, get your Portal gun shoot it at white walls in order to create portals and solve puzzles. Knowing its role as a sequel, though, Portal 2 does not go easy on players just because the game is only starting; in fact, it begins with its difficulty level at quite a satisfying level, which is easy enough for beginners to pick up, and hard enough for veteran gamers not to fall asleep. This outstanding balance is achieved by introducing new puzzle elements from the very beginning of the game, such as light bridges that go through portals and ust catapults that launch players and cubes into the air, as a consequence – even though the game's difficulty curve does not pick up exactly from where it left off when the original Portal was going into the sunset, even skilled puzzle masters will have a certain degree of learning to do in the early stages of the game. Once again, the puzzles are all wonderfully designed. They thrive in being extremely simple in their set-up, but surprisingly complex and thought-demanding in their solutions. Portal 2 never overwhelms players with information, something that puzzle games are always running the risk of doing, it chooses to just stump by intelligence, and not by scope.

The Portal 2 experience is not restricted to finding how to open the door to the next room just to be welcomed by another fantastic puzzle, actually, that is only a tiny fraction of the whole package. In the short intervals when Chell is going from one gauntlet to the next one, she will once again be treated to some of the finest threats a robotic mind could ever come up with. GLADOS is incredibly hilarious in the many ways she tries to bring Chell down, by either accusing her test subject of looking hideous in her Aperture Science testing outfit or by insinuating Chell might be adopted. The fact that players already know GLADOS is one evil machine allowed Valve to drop all the subtleness found in the dialogue of the first game in order to go full-scale with the insulting and the writers manage to keep her character discomfortingly evil, creepy and funny all at the same time. It is hard to correctly say how an actually intelligent machine might try to verbally attack a human being, but it has got to be something real close to Valve's portrayal of GLADOS and her lack of touch when it comes to human feelings.

Wheatley's personality is one pleasant counterweight to GLADOS purely evil heart. Through the game's first half the robot will be your faithful partner, trying to save you from tough situations and finding a way to sabotage GLADOS. The eventual exchanges between the two bots are worthy of a writing award, because not only are their lines all crafted in a calculated way to trigger certain reactions from players, but they also dig deeper into the character of the two machines that will accompany Chell through her journey. It is impossible to feel emotionally distant from the pair of robots, just like it is impossible not to cling to every one of the lines being mouthed by them. The combination gives Portal 2 a very different atmosphere from the original. Where Portal was dense and sinister, Portal 2 is much more lighthearted, even if there are still plenty of darker moments.

Eventually, though, Portal 2 will become what Portal fans expect it to be, a bigger and more ambitious version of the original. During the second half of the game, everything grows in proportion and size, and Chell will find herself out of the modern-looking test chambers and inside poorly-lit, huge and unknown areas of Aperture Science. Although this second portion of the game is made interesting by the dive players will end up taking into the back-story of the company in order to discover some shocking details about this twisted place, the gameplay loses rhythm when the games' tentacles spread out and players see themselves in sprawling environments where progressing is more a matter of looking around to find where to go next, than putting your brain cells into motion to reach areas that seem unreachable or perform actions that defy all laws of physics and common sense.

Fortunately, before things are over, the game goes back to more restricted environments with the introduction of three different liquids that add more unique mechanics to your puzzle-solving. Those three liquids, when spread on a surface, will allow Chell to run much faster than usual, bounce around, and create portals on walls that where doing so was previously impossible, and they go to show that even after doing what Portal did in a different way and growing into larger environments, the people behind the game made sure to surprise players until the very end with the constant introduction of different elements of gameplay. Very few games out there display the same amount of attention to detail and creative thinking, and even though things get a tad boring when the game grows bigger, Portal 2 shows no sign of laziness, meaning that developers were not satisfied to simply bring back more of the same successful formula. They went out there and tried, and – for the most part – they succeeded.

The ultimate question is: Does Portal 2 surpass the original?! It clearly does. It is bigger, and it is better. It did not involve in terms of visuals and sound, which are not going to get any awards, but that do their job quite well; it is, however, a huge step forward in both gameplay and storytelling. Throughout its six hours of single-player gameplay Portal 2 will always be throwing new things at the players, whether it is a new puzzle element or a dramatic change of pace, it is a game that never gets stale. Its two biggest issues are the constant loading points that show up in-between every room and some slower parts during the single-player campaign, but it is hard not to forgive those tiny sins in the face of a wonderful cooperative mode that adds many hours to the package by opening up new puzzle possibilities with the use of two portal guns by the team of robots, and an equally great single-player mode. Portal 2 packs a lot of value, brilliant dialogues, fantastic riddles and a great surprising story. Some games seem to be happy with having one single prowess, Portal 2 is always looking for a new way to amaze.