Yep, I'm going to play the sequel to one of my favorite games. Ok if you're not familiar with the first Portal here's the game in a nutshell. You play as someone who's just woken from stasis. You are tasked with solving puzzles in, I believe 19, test chambers. You do this with your trusty Portal Gun. A device that lets you bend space to your will. You create two linked portals, one orange and one blue. You "shoot" both portals using the triggers on your controller. (I played it on the 360, your controlls may differ depending on if you play on the PS3 or the PC.) You can only place the portals on a certain type of surface, once you have placed your portals you can essentially move from one end of the room to the other without more than 2 steps. Now there's many things you can do with the portals but I'll get to that later. As you move through the various test chambers, you're only companion is a computerized female voice. GLaDOS, as you'll find through out your adventure, is the computer overseer of the facility you're in. Eventually things take a turn for the worse and you're forced to have a climactic battle against her. I won't spoil the ending, but you'll eventually get out of the facility. Oh there's also a cake that may or may not be a lie.
Apparently it's a lie......though it's in most games...
Now that that's out of the way, on to Portal 2.
Portal 2 picks up after the events in Portal. The main character from the first game, Chell, has escaped and GLaDOS has been deactivated, and the facility has lost power to most of it's life support systems. You get woken up out of stasis by a robot orb thing called Wheatley. It's not long before Wheatley decides to help you escape the facility, and your stasis chamber/hotel room is whisked off and you're slammed into a wall untill it crumbles and your adventure begins.
The story is pretty good, you'll find out that you're Chell and that.........well you're never told how you got back into the facility after you escaped in the first game. Through out the course of the story you'll reactivate GLaDOS, try to escape the facility, and almost cause it to explode in a nuclear explosion. You know your standard fare. Ok maybe not. Still the story is great, there's alot of humor and you'll learn to love GLaDOS. Though the humor here isn't as tounge and cheek as the first one, but still all and all the story is easily the best aspect for me.
Our Heroine everyone
The gameplay is the same as the first one, you'll use the portal gun to solve a multitude of puzzles each more challenging than the last. Though this time you'll also have some gels later on in the game, to help you along your way. There's three different types. The blue Repulsion Gel that will make you bounce into the air based on how high you jumped on to it. The greater the fall, the higher the bounce! There's the orange Perpulsion Gel, that will speed up your movement, you'll be able to reach new heights just from running off a ramp. Last but not least is the white Conversion Gel. It's basically ground up moon rocks that will make any surface it sticks to able to hold a portal. This is an interesting twist on the game, instead of just using your portals to complete various puzzles, you'll have to use a combination of an infinite portal fall (where you place one portal on the ceiling and one on the floor so you fall untill you reach terminal velocity), Conversion Gel, Repulsion Gel and sometimes the Perpulsion Gel (you can use the Perpulsion Gel and the portals to do the same kind of trick as with the portals on the ceiling and the floor) to complete your objective.
Wait....what?
The graphics are well done as well. Though it won't be long before you're seeing white, black, brown and some grey. The color pallet is varried in the begining of the game, you'll see green plants, sky in some places, and the dingy white walls of the facility you're stuck in. After GLaDOS is activated the facility slowly rebuilds and becomes stark white almost all of the time. Now this is one of the gripes that I brought up in my GoW reviews. It seems that game developers are trying to save money by using as few colors as possible, unlike GoW however, there's a reason behind this. The white is pretty much telling you where you can place a portal, and other colors are telling you a portal won't stick here. So there's a method to the lack of color, but I had to bring it up because of GoW having a small color pallet.
Now there's one more thing I want to bring up before I end this review. There's a co-op feature. That's right you can now play Portal with a buddy. My experience was with Koji, so you know there was alot of backstabbing, cursing, and just general griefing. Man was it fun.
The co-op works just like the singleplayer, though things are a bit different. You and your buddy play as robots, created by GLaDOS. You're both part of the Cooperative Testing Initative. Basically you're there so that GLaDOS can phase out human testing. The gameplay is catered towards both players working together to complete the tests. Needless to say Koji and I had to repeat some tests more often than others. Each player has a portal gun that can fire two linked portals. Sorry outside the box thinkers, you can't have one person fire a portal and then have the other fire the other portal and them be linked.
Atlas (Left) and P-body (Right), the future of Apature Science!
The co-op can be played either over teh interwebz on your platform of choice, or with your friend sitting right next to you on the coutch. So there's no reason why you shouldn't try this out. Just make sure you can trus the person you play with.
All and all Portal 2 is a great game with alot of humor and some memorable moments. It's not quite as good as the first one, but then again sequels rarely are. I recommend everyone play this or the first game. If you haven't played it then you're missing out.
Till next time kiddies,
-Vangle
No comments:
Post a Comment