23 Nov
After the events of the first game, not to mention the ravages of time, the premises of Aperture Laboratories are understandably in a less than pristine condition.
The first Portal needs no introduction. This is after all the game that spurred a plethora of remarkably persistent memes. It combined so much brilliance in such a compact package that it is pretty much a game than anyone with any interest at all in PC games must play. This sequel was released in April of this year, but I’ve only gotten around to playing it recently. Here are my thoughts:
The Good Stuff
- More Portal is never a bad thing and this is definitely a worthy sequel. It’s also considerably longer than the original and basically offers more of everything: more story, more characters, greater diversity of environments, more puzzle elements.
- I love the new character of Wheatley and his dialogue especially since my wife and I have watched all of the UK version of The Office.
- The new puzzle elements are great. There’s only so much that you can do with only portals. The gels are okay but my favorite new element are the hard light bridges, capable of letting you stand nearly everywhere, block enemy turrets and flying objects and even catch falling cubes.
- Having the first few levels of the new game being aged versions of the original ones added a touch of nostalgia that I appreciated.
- Seeing the old versions of the Aperture Labs was a lot of fun, and I felt a Bioshock vibe from the decor. The character of Cave Johnson made the craziness of the labs a bit more plausible.
- I enjoyed the many visual storytelling elements littered throughout the levels. From the briefing screens in the new elevator rooms to the science projects done by the children of Aperture employees. It’s more subtle than using voice-acting and fills out missing parts of the overall story nicely.
- As usual, the Valve’s developer commentary mode is excellent, especially with regards to the huge amount of work needed accomplish some of the effects. Still, there could have been more of them and some levels don’t have even a single commentary node.
Just because Chell doesn’t have a gun doesn’t mean that she can’t take the offensive.
The Less Good Stuff
- I found single-player game to be somewhat too easy. No doubt some of this is due to familiarity with the first game. A quick test run by my wife revealed than she found it suitably challenging. But I think that a number of design decisions made this sequel easier as well. For example, there are now no timed puzzles. No doubt these can be frustrating, especially when a mistake can kill a player, but they’re good for generating tension as well. Even the developer commentary has some notes about how some puzzles were made easier after playtesting, such as consolidating many elements into a large room instead of separating them out a series of connected rooms. I remember the original had more puzzles which forced you to memorize the elements in a sequence of rooms to make use of all of them.
- The hardest bits of the game for me consisted of hunting for the portal surface hidden in a vast environment. Tucking the sole surface you can shoot a portal onto behind a small crack in the wall does not a puzzle make. It’s the sort thing that made the old-style Sierra adventure games so silly. In general I’m also annoyed that the default surface in this game are not portal capable, which makes the rare surface that you can shoot portals onto stand out so starkly that the designers might as well be shouting, “shoot a portal here, that’s part of the solution!” I think the first game had portalable surfaces as the default and it was the overwhelming number of possibilities that made it challenging. It also allowed for alternative solutions to puzzles that the designers didn’t plan for.
Isn’t it odd how decades old installations seem to work mostly fine in games?
- The addition of more interstitial areas to tell the story was nice, but it detracted from the purity of the puzzle game. I guess I just really like testing and solving puzzles.
- I was very unhappy to see that there’s no advanced versions of the standard levels. Instead, you get to run through the same rooms as a race. I really enjoyed the advanced versions in the original game. This time they’re replaced with a two-player cooperative campaign which I’m unlikely to get around to playing.
- Once again the game ends with a boss battle which I’m not happy about. Yeah, the surprise at the end is great but please why even have another version of the boss fight from the first game?
All this makes it sound like I’m really down on the game but that’s not true at all. It’s an excellent game and it’s surely not the sequel’s fault if it can’t be the surprise hit that the original was. But one thing that the original excelled at was making players feel really smart about solving the puzzles that are actually well within the reach of the average player. I fear that this time around the designers erred too far towards making it accessible, making the puzzles feel like a total cakewalk instead of a genuine brain-teaser.
The excursion funnel is the game’s way of putting you on rails to give the player a break and advance the story.
Written on November 23 2011 and is filed under PC Games.
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3 Responses to “Portal 2”
I think there’s two things going on that make this feel easier than the original. They explored the mechanics pretty thoroughly in the first one, so we’ve already internalized pretty much everything you can do with two portals and one person. The other thing is the abundance of non-portalable surfaces. The specific patches you need being portalable essentially gives you hints towards the solution. There was some good stuff toward the end with the white gel where it felt like you were creatively coming up with a way to achieve your goals rather than finding the solution, but not a lot and it was late.
You really should try to give co-op a try. It’s a completely different set of levels, and the new challenges possible with two players do a good job of evoking that feeling of coming to understand the set of mechanics and using them creatively. It sounds like a small tweak at first, but the combinatorics of having two sets of portals interacting with the world is actually a much bigger deal than any of the new devices they introduced.
They definitely made it more accessible with the difficulty toned down. If you read the Final Hour Portal 2 digital book, you’ll find that many levels were cut out because of difficulty etc.
I actually loved the story telling in Portal 2, the breaks in between. It was funny, had amazing music and added character to a game with not that many characters(maybe a lot if compared to the original Portal). And all the added character to the game didn’t feel out of place as well.
Plus… we all have to be prepared for the Animal King when the apocalypse eventually happens 😛
@ Julian.
Yeah, agreed on the difficulty part. And yes, it did feel that the level where you had infinite amounts of white gel to fling around was the one that gave you the most room for flexibility.
The hard thing about two-player co-op is that it’s a puzzle game, so there’s no replay value at all. It’s hard to imagine anyone still online playing it months after release. Anyway my only net access right now is wireless 3G so I’m not in any position to try out online play for a while.
@ frags
It’s sad that they cut out levels due to difficulty. Couldn’t they have just made them optional levels or something?
Also, I didn’t dislike the interstitial storytelling stuff. But part of the charm of the first portal was how pure and how minimalistic the design was. This made small things like, “the cake was a lie” and “Still Alive” stand out so strongly. Now it’s more like the story elements of your usual FPS game.
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