Portal 2 Review

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Portal 2
Platform: Xbox 360
Played For: 9 hrs

When friends who know nothing about the world of video games ask me to give them a glimpse of what it is all about, my first instinct is often to reach for the Orange Box. Featuring the epic Half-Life 2 complete with add-on episodes and the silly fun of Team Fortress, it is hard to overestimate the value of Valve’s signature collection. But it was the inclusion of a fifth little game, rough around the edges and clearly a developer pet project that unexpectedly elevated the Orange Box to the status of instant cult classic. The game, of course, was Portal, in all of its cake and companion-cube glory. An instant hit for puzzle-solvers with a liking for mathematics, spatial relations or clever ridicule, Portal proved itself to be a memorable experience with a loyal following. Facing the highest of expectations and a goal to establish a wider audience, can the inevitable sequel meet the hopes of gamers old and new alike?

Portal 2 begins in a similar fashion to the original, as Chell wakes up to find herself once again a human lab rat for Aperture Science. This time we get a bit more context… Chell has been in cryostasis for an indeterminate number of years, and some crisis or another has left Aperture running itself, without human oversight. Things are falling apart as witless automatons and production centers fight a losing battle against entropy. This is, of course, a hallowed theme in science fiction (check out The Flying Dutchman by Ward Moore way back in 1956 for an example). You do have to wonder just where all the people might have gone, and if there is any tie between the world of Portal and that of Half-life 2. GLaDOS vs. the Combine sounds like a nerdogasm waiting to happen.
Luckily for Chell, one particularly silly robot arrives to rescue her from her cell, a little spherical buddy named Wheatley who acts and sounds like Ricky Gervais. Chell, for her part, remains silent, and the story suggests that her long period of sleep has damaged the speech center of her brain (that would be Broca’s area located in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus, neuroscience fans). Wheatley provides much of the signature Portal humor for the first part of the game, and I am pleased to say he is up to the challenge.

With this back-story to add some flavor and variety to both the visuals and the dialogue, Portal 2 launches the player into the familiar formula of the original game. Chell is soon navigating test chambers with portal gun in hand and “long fall boots” on foot like some post-apocalypse teleporting spring-heeled jack. It will come as no surprise to learn that GLaDOS is also soon back to her usual tricks. While there are some nice twists in both story and environment as you proceed, the core of the game remains figuring out how to get from point A to point B or how to keep a door open long enough for Chell to get through it (here’s a hint: it usually involves a button).

All of your favorite test chamber elements are back, including companion cubes, cute and deadly turrets, acid floors and those annoying particle emancipation fields that keep you from porting stuff from one chamber to the next. But Portal is all about “having fun with science” and Portal 2 continues this fine tradition with new elements that attack all kinds of familiar physical laws and properties. In addition to concentrated lasers and refraction cubes to redirect them, Chell soon encounters springboards that launch things flying into the air and genuine force fields that block everything except light. The puzzles felt easier than in the first game, but this was mostly due to fewer requirements for physical dexterity on the part of the player. Once you see the solution to a puzzle, implementing it is easy and forgiving… the game does not require a lot of accuracy or quick portal deployment like its predecessor.

Some of the best new inventions come later in the game, however, in the form of paints. Long strings of puzzles involve orange, blue and white globs of goop that spray and coat every wall, ceiling and floor in reach. Orange paint makes for a frictionless surface that Chell can slide across at faster and faster speeds. Blue glop turns out to be bouncy… I guess the idea is that is plays around with kinetic and potential energy conservation… there’s definitely an in-joke for physics types in here somewhere. Finally, the white dye turns non-portalable surfaces into portal-ready spaces… it seems that portals can only form on flat white paint. Since white reflects light rather than absorbing it like black, I guess you could jury-rig some kind of explanation for this… but I’m not going to try. This is SCIENCE in big block letters, you know, the kind you see in Doctor Who or in old adventure novels where the professorial type explains everything away with “vibrations” or “waves.”

And speaking of SCIENCE, Portal 2 also provides back-story on the founder of Aperture Science, an enthusiastic businessman named Cave Johnson. Cave is the voice of narration for the series of tech demo trailers that preceded the release of Portal 2. Cave is funny, but between him, GLaDOS and Wheatley the laughs do grow a bit repetitive even during a somewhat short single-player campaign. Unsafe testing conditions, ha-ha, no one gives a damn about human lab rats, chuckle chuckle, your death is imminent, guffaw guffaw. Portal 2 is a strange beast in that it doesn’t go far enough in expanding upon its back-story to make a truly interesting journey of discovery, but at the same time one of the game’s greatest weaknesses is giving an explanation as to how GLaDOS and Aperture came to be. GLaDOS is better as a remote, unknowable and capricious entity… the more you learn about her, the less interesting she becomes.

I did like the constant whirring and motion of the factory behind the scenes of the test chambers. Panels, which in the Portal world are several foot wide tiles that form the floors, walls and ceilings of test chambers, are each attached to mechanical arms that are often caught unprepared and in the act of restoring test chambers to functionality as Chell encounters them. Aperture Science itself is a nightmare of such scenes, with walls of busy panels and cubes, great dark abysses with whirling person-sized pneumatic tubes and cavernous metal chambers echoing the sounds of metal straining from the burden of ages. There is a wonderful frenetic feel to the place, as if everything is in a rush to meet production quotas, without knowledge that there is no longer a reason to do so. If only the load times between levels were not quite so long, the uninterrupted vision of automization gone terribly wrong could have been a truly immersive experience.

It also bears mentioning that the finale of the single-player campaign is simply great, and the player is awarded with a new song that manages to match the high expectations set by the original Portal credits sequence. There are also Avatar Awards on the Xbox 360 version of the game, as well as the usual assortment of achievements and hidden messages within the game. Hunting for secrets can extend the play time, although with few clues to work from it could be a daunting task to determine which part of the game to replay in order to go looking… here Valve missed a chance to add a second level of puzzling to the experience… scavenger hunt, anyone?

In addition to the relatively short single-player campaign, Portal 2 features a Co-op adventure for two players who take the roles of robot test subjects Atlas and P-body. Each robot comes equipped with its own portal gun, and as you work your way through a new set of team-building test chambers you are slowly awarded with executable gestures such as hi-fives, dance routines, rock paper scissors and the like. In order to determine if two portal guns are better than one, I employed the aid of my evil cousin CotangentX, who promptly used the first refraction cube we found to chase me around with a laser beam. Having thus established the proper atmosphere of mutual trust and support, we ventured forward into the co-op campaign proper.

The Co-op levels are well implemented, with an easy to use system to flag things for your partner to notice and some nice team-building encouragement from GLaDOS. The difficulty is not too bad, although some of the Co-op achievements can be very tough to score on the first try (especially trying not to die throughout the entire set of Level 4 challenges.. good luck with that one. Atlas and P-body are appropriately lovable, and it must only be a matter of time before desktop miniatures hit the store shelves.

Whether Portal 2 succeeds at breaking into the Mainstream or not remains to be seen. It was certainly given the advertising budget to do so, as for weeks I’ve been seeing ads for it on the sides of buses, on TV, around the internet and possibly injected into the very atmosphere we breathe. Actually, some of Cave Johnson’s tech demos were quite funny, and it would have been easy for the folks at Valve to have included them on the disk as extras. While I found the length and content of Portal 2 to be satisfying enough, the game has drawn some criticism for lack of breadth… enough; in fact, that there is a rumor that Valve will soon release an extra set of downloadable levels for free. This, I think, is a fair response, although I wonder if they didn’t ever consider giving consumers a portal level editor or some actual humorous science lessons related to the crazy tech of the game, or even an “Eliza” style speak with GLaDOS app.

Portal 2 has all the components of a quality game, but like GLaDOS designing a test chamber, Valve seems to have taken great care to give players only the bare minimum necessary in a $60 major release. It seems Cave Johnson is alive and well at Valve, and buying this game at full price does make you run the risk of feeling like another of his test subject schmucks.