Portal 2: Min Wage Review

The best feeling in life is the moment of anticipation. A waiter carrying your dish at a restaurant, the lights going out at a concert, the moment of silence before kissing someone for the first time. All these moments themselves may be great but never quite compare to the anticipation. Portal 2 does. Now, honestly I wasn't really all that excited for Portal 2 at first. I mean, I liked Portal, it was funny and unique but I'm more into action games. If Portal wasn't a piece of the Orange Box I probably wouldn't have played it until much later when it was offered for free. Even then I didn't get Orange Box until 2009 so I was over a year late to the Portal and TeamFortress 2 party, let alone over 4 years late for the Half-Life 2 party which is the game I primarily wanted to play at the time. Half-Life 2 destroyed all my expectations but that's a discussion for a different time (hint: after the story is completed).

When Portal 2 was announced I had no doubt it'd be fun considering the relationship I have with Valve's games up to this point. They're my favorite developer and I'd likely buy anything they release on that trust alone. Portal 2 wasn't exactly what I was hoping for at this point in time but it could have been worse. However, as time passed and more campaign trailers and media started rolling out I became fascinated by the level of finesse and depth. I'm also fascinated by Valve's occasional interviews about business and technology aspirations because there are some true visionaries and geniuses working at Valve and they're not tied down by publisher or investor interests. They made their own fortunes and they're allowed to play around with no one looming over them. It requires a great deal of discipline and direction to make products as revolutionary and polished as Valve does without becoming the next 3D Realms. So it's with this in mind that I love jumping on their experimentation bandwagons. When it was announced that Portal 2 would be bringing the Steam client to PS3 I was finally sold. I knew I wanted to own this game. The more videos started to pour out that want turned into a need. I had to see where Valve were taking single player games because Half-Life 2 has been out of sight for 4 years and every game launched since then has been a multiplayer one. Portal looked to be groomed to be the heir of Valve's solo campaign experiences and no amount of Portal and momentum puzzles are going to fulfill what Half-Life 2 left behind.

Now with all that being said it's time to talk about the quibbles. The first Portal gave you a room of possibilities and asked you to find a solution. Portal 2 gives you a room of obstacles and asks you to find THE solution. There's laser switches, launch pads, excursion funnels, gels that change the properties of surfaces and all the mechanics of Portal. Throwing all this at once would terrifying but the game slowly weens you to each mechanic and severely limits the possible actions by removing all but necessary portal surfaces. On the one hand you have to think harder about how to navigate through courses but on the other the solution is practically half laid out for you already and it's just a matter of figuring out in which order the portal walls need to be used. Also, by the time you've finally mastered every type of mechanic in the game you're at the final boss before getting the chance to put all your skills to the test at once. This would make the end of the game much more challenging but the addition of challenge courses on the side would suffice.

Once I finished the solo campaign I figured all the crazy Portal ninja-ing I saw in trailers would be put to the test in the co-op chambers. Now, in all fairness the puzzles got a bit challenging to figure out and a few new mechanics need to be utilized that aren't explained at all in the solo campaign which will probably throw you for a loop towards the end. However, again there isn't a true set of challenges that put all your skills together in a test save perhaps for the final co-op chamber. Without adequate communication, that means using a mic or playing split-screen, you probably won't finish co-op anyway so the addition of challenge courses on the side would suffice here as well.

Where Portal introduced a few simple mechanics beautifully and then exercised them to their limits, Portal 2 feels like an 8-10 hour (depending on how fast your puzzle solving skills are) tutorial. It sure as hell gets challenging and rarely feels too easy on the first playthrough but the better you get the more you want something harder. Here's a metaphor: in a shooter you'll start with a pistol and gradually get a rifle, then a shotgun, then a machine gun, then a rocket launcher and the game needs to get harder to accommodate the weaponry. Portal 2 is like a shooter where you get all your 'weapons' at a perfect pace but you never have to use them after the 'testing' phase where you're still giggling at explosions.

We come back to anticipation. I anticipated Portal 2 to be a fun game that I'd play once or twice, have a few good laughs and never touch again like its predecessor. This is the nature of solo campaign games particularly ones with puzzle heavy gameplay. However, what I got was an extensively long, fulfilling campaign that never got tired, repetitive or dragged out. To top it off there's enough laughs stuffed inside to keep you laughing the entire time your playing outside of puzzle solving. You never know what to expect around the next corner and there's little to be disappointed about. What I can say about Portal 2 I can't say about many other things in life, I felt better right after playing Portal 2 than I did right before, Portal 2 is better than anticipation.