Could a moron do this?
You played Portal 2? I have. It was like: pretty good. You whinged about Portal 2? I’m about to! It’ll be like: wtf is this dude’s problem? Consider this post to be infested with the spoilage — if you don’t want to know this stuff, unread it.
When Portal came out, I commented that it was neat, but that the writing was clearly what held the game together; the actual portal mechanic is clever, but fairly shallow, and by the end of its two-hour run time, they’d clearly run out of interesting things to do with it. Portal 2’s the same. The primary difference is that they’d run out of fun things to do with portals before they actually started this time, and the brunt of the game is spent solving other, non-portal-related puzzles, while the portal gun is relegated to a supporting role of helping you move around the room while you redirect lasers or slosh pudding all over the floor or whatever it is you’re doing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — the puzzles are fun enough in and of themselves — but it’s a bit less portal-y than you may be expecting.
This time around, the physics have been gimmicked to make things less fiddly, which is a good thing. If there’s one thing absolutely nobody liked about the original Portal, it was how obnoxious it was to try to carry a box through a portal. If you’re not lined up just right, you’ll bonk the thing into the portal’s frame and drop it. This is no longer an issue in Portal 2; it appears that, as long as you’re aimed such that Chell can get though the portal herself, the box will go too. Also noteworthy is that Valve has clearly learned the lesson of Metroid Prime: first-person platforming is only fun with extremely generous tolerances. It’s not important in Portal 2 to make your jumps precise, or to hit the aerial faith plate at exactly the right trajectory — get it pretty much right, and the game will fudge it so you succeed. Portal placement is also gimmicked this time around, so you don’t have to spend ages trying to get that portal lined up just right for your giant launch; the game tends to centre them for you, and also tends to line them up so you don’t shoot out in some odd orientation.
But let’s be serious: nobody’s playing this game out of a deep desire to spray orange pudding on the floor and then run on it. We’re here to listen to GLaDOS make fat jokes. And in that respect, the game certainly delivers. GLaDOS returns for another round of mechanised abuse, and she’s joined by two new characters whose identities I will not reveal. One of them is awesome. The other one… I didn’t love. I am assured through my highly rigorous scientific polling that everybody in the world except me did love this character, though, so I guess either it’s just me or else everybody else in the world is a tasteless boor. Whichever one seems more likely to you.
The game’s a bit longer this time, though it’s still short — probably took me around eight hours start to finish. If you can squeeze ten out of it, it comes in at exactly the same ratio of dollars to play hours that the original Portal had! But that’s just the single-player campaign; there’s also a co-op mode, which is an entirely separate set of levels, and appears to be pretty fun. You and a friend get together and robot the eff around — you each have a portal gun, which means four total portals in play; this helps to mitigate the "done everything with portals already" miasma quite a lot, since there’s a whole bunch of new stuff you can do with extra portals. There’s also a robot enrichment menu from which you can attach various skins, hats, accessories, and emotes to your robots, which is pretty fun. I’m given to understand that PC and Mac co-op is interoperable, and you can play with PS3 players also (though I guess PS3 partners won’t see your robot skins), assuming Sony ever gets around to fixing its broken internet service.
So is Portal 2 worth it? The length makes it a bit of a tough sell at $50 in my opinion, though the co-op campaign will be the saving grace if you’re into that sort of thing. If you’re more single-player only, I’d suggest waiting until it comes down in price; it’s fun, but — much like the original Portal — wildly overrated. 96 metascore is looney-tunes.
But then I remember that goddamn Bioshock also got a metascore of 96. At least Portal 2 is actually finished.
