Portal 2 - Valve Does it Again

Some Background on How Portal Came to Be

Valve has a very impressive track record, and it's caused a lot of strangely well-founded hate, because Valve simply cannot seem to make a bad game. Starting with Half-Life, Valve started as a relatively unknown company that made one hell of a PC game. In 1998, Half-Life had unbelievably impressive visuals, taking a lot of PCs at the time to their maximum limits. Everything about the game was beyond stellar, completely trouncing the consoles in graphics, showing what potential PC games still had even though the days of Doom and Myst were over. Of course, not only were the graphics good, but the story was superb, and featured great first-person shooter mechanics. PC games generally take full advantage of the quick movement one can do in 360 degrees with the mouse, so it really is only natural to develop FPS for PCs. 

After the success of Half-Life, some avid gamers modded the game and produced 2 notable mods: Counter-Strike, a deathmatch multiplayer game featuring terrorists against counter-terrorism units, and Day of Defeat, another deathmatch multiplayer game taking place in World War II in the European theater featuring the U.S. troops against the Wehrmacht. Although similar, Counter-Strike had rules where if you died, you did not revive and had to rely on your teammates to succeed. Matches were usually short, taking advantage that one could not revive. In Day of Defeat, players could resurrect infinitely since the game was all about capturing territory.

With the success of these 2 mods, Valve was so impressed that they hired the people who made them as full employees. A few years later, six years after the original Half-Life, Valve created a new engine they dubbed the "Source" engine and used it in Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and Day of Defeat: Source. The Source engine was well received because of, once again, incredible visuals in 2004 and the physics used to make trajectory much more realistic.

A few years later, Valve released a compilation of games dubbed The Orange Box. TOB's main function was not really to sell HL2 again, but rather to include the latest chapter in the Half-Life saga, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the long-awaited sequel to Team Fortress, Team Fortress 2, and a new IP by the name of Portal.

Now for the Actual Review

Portal ended up overshadowing everything in The Orange Box. It took a concept not seen since Myst: a game in the first-person perspective, but you would not be given a weapon. You are given a Portal Gun, capable of making portals through time-space, allowing you to enter what was once a wall and exit on a completely different side of the room. To describe Portal with words is nigh-impossible due to how unique it is. The game is all about puzzle-solving, interspersed with a light story about an A.I. named GLaDOS and her test subject, Chell, a young woman who stays silent throughout. Portal was so incredibly well-received that many started demanding a sequel, disappointed that the original game was so short even though it was just an experiment. The experiment was a triumphant success and now we have Portal 2.

Portal 2's story cannot be explained without spoiling the ending of the first game, although at this point everybody knows that The Cake Is A Lie and you pulled off the trope namer of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. Needless to say, you once again control Chell (who has had her appearance modified to look much more like the actress modeled after her) and have you solve puzzles with your Portal Gun in the Aperture Science laboratories.

Chell in Portal (Left), Chell in Portal 2 (Middle), Chell modeled after actress Alésia Toyoko Glidewell (right)

It's only been 4 years since the original Portal, but it's fairly obvious that the graphics have improved considerably, even though the Source engine is now being pushed to its absolute limits. You get to retread many of the original puzzle rooms from the first game, and it's quite evident how much time has passed as well as how much more effort Valve took with the sequel; they weren't kidding when they said the original was made by 8 people.

The same gameplay elements from the original return, along with some new ones, since the entire game is all about puzzles and getting harder and harder as you reach the end, culminating in the only boss fight in the game where you put your puzzle solving skills to the test and use a gun that can only make inter-dimensional portals to get the boss to kill themself in a time limit. It's all done fantastically, but there are 2 or 3 puzzles that are very difficult to solve that can be a bit infuriating once you realize the solution.

Where Portal 2 stands out more than anything, even more than the gameplay, is the voice acting. There's only 4 characters in the entire game with spoken dialogue, but each one boasts stellar voice acting. GLaDOS gets even better lines, despite very few of them being meme worthy. Valve took absolute care that the game did not get spoiled via the 2 most infamous memes, The Cake Is A Lie and Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. Portal 2 has some lines that are beyond hilarious, but none of them spoil the plot, my favorite probably being, "WARNING! Neurotoxin at dangerously unlethal levels!" The voice acting is made even better by the impeccable writing, something that certain video game companies are having a lot of trouble with.

Story: 9/10
Gameplay: 10/10
Presentation: 10/10
Replay Value: 7/10

Average Score:      9/10

The story could have been just a bit longer, but at the same time one feels that if it were any longer, the puzzles would have become too difficult. Replay value is low, but the game is just too hilarious to play through once. Some free DLC will be available this summer, and Valve has included a co-op mode that has its own story, allowing gamers to use four portals to solve puzzles. As far as when Portal 3 gets made, it's hard to tell since Chell's story is over, but GLaDOS is still at Aperture Science. Valve still has to make Half-Life 2: Episode 3 and begin working on Half-Life 3. Valve is infamous for delaying games to eternity, even though they all eventually come out.

I'm looking forward for what's next from Portal, especially whatever this summer's DLC is. I just want more hilarious lines from GLaDOS, quite frankly. Why are you still reading this? Go buy Portal 2!