Portal 2 - PC

I'm editing this review after some feedback that people didn't find it "helpful." The original portal was an amazing and innovative game, and at least some of its appeal came from the fact that it was so unique. It stands to reason that any sequel is going to have a hard time measuring up. I say this because with Portal 2 the designers, not wanting to directly copy the original, tried to do something a little bit different, probably to keep things fresh. It works, and it makes for a great game, but it also means that you lose a little bit of the magic of portal 1. PUZZLES: The puzzle element of the game has changed a bit. In portal 1 the challenge came from figuring out exactly what you had to do, and more often than not there was more than one way to solve a particular puzzle. The game would throw you into a room and just leave you to figure things out. In Portal 2, figuring out the puzzle is still a part of the game, but most of the challenges are fairly straight forward. In many cases you'll find yourself scanning a room for the single piece of wall that you know immediately that you have to use. The "difficulty" in this game comes from the execution, more than the solving, of the puzzle. You need to hit things in just the right order, in just the right moment, jump just right, fire at the right moment, etc. The puzzles are still fun and engaging. If you have or haven't played the original you'll find them fun either way, it's just worth noting that the formula has changed somewhat, but the game remains fun. STORY: What story there was in portal 1 was told mostly in the background, through vague hints and scattered pieces of dialog. That has completely changed in portal 2. There are still plenty of subtle hints and comments to keep your ears open for, but the story element of the game has definitely taking a leading role this time around. Personally I find this to be a great change, and well worth a couple playthroughs to make sure you don't miss anything. There are plenty of easter eggs to be found. You don't need to play the original to get into the story here, though having at least the basics of what happened last time around will help you figure out what is happening at the beginning. CONCLUSION All-in-all this game is great fun, has amazing dialog, and includes a killer multiplayer mode. I highly recommend it, whether you played the original or not. The formula has changed a bit, but the game remains a great buy.

I was a big fan of the original Portal and I felt that it was an incredibly innovative combination of first-person action with puzzle solving. It was (and still is) an excellent game for gamers and non-gamers alike. The sequel, Portal 2, expands greatly upon the original. It has many of the same game mechanics (and is therefore familiar to those coming from Portal) while still having the gradual learning curve that made the first game so accessible. It is also a much longer game than the fairly brief original, spanning several chapters over different types of locations. The story is absolutely wonderful and just as funny (while still being a little creepy if you think about it) as the original. You're introduced to new characters (a couple through audio recordings that guide you through levels as well as one that you interact with) and get to learn about the history of Aperture Laboratories through a series of excellent levels that take place in a huge sealed off area of the Labs. The game also introduces several new tools to use in solving puzzles and overall, it is an incredibly enjoyable experience. I did find that the puzzles (both in test chambers and out) did not reach the same level of challenge as in the original (the later levels of which involved a great deal of careful timing and fast reflexes)...some gamers may appreciate this change (with challenge emphasized more in thinking things through than quick action) while some may dislike it. So overall I'd very much recommend this game. In fact, the gameplay and story are so good that I played it twice through in a row, something I've never done with a game before! (there is also an entirely separate co-op game that I haven't played yet...it may offer some of the types of challenges that aren't in the single player experience)

Well, then again, maybe it won't, because Portal 1 already got that; that might be considered unfair. Anyway, it's very much appreciated how there is probably three times as many puzzles and so many new gimmicks. Conversion Gel was a very surprising awesomeness. Turrets can be destroyed in different ways now, too. It's nice to have more characters--really the right amount. The story is more in-depth than the other. It doesn't have as many funny one-liners as the other (though it does have more overall one-liners). It also has an ending that probably deserves to not be spoiled. Cooperative mode is definitely a great addition, and is better played when both players are unfamiliar with the puzzles. For those who haven't even played the original Portal, that's OK. It's not necessary to play the original to understand this game. It's refreshing to have a first-person shooter game that's not about violence, but about puzzles. The puzzles are, of course, something you won't find in other games. Essentially, you shoot a blue portal on one surface and an orange on the other. The direction may change, but the speed that you enter will not. Some surfaces are unable to have portals placed on them, though, and that's why it works so well. The various gels, catapults, and lasers will end up becoming necessary resources when portals cannot be used. Of course, they're not lasers. They're "Thermal Discouragement Beams." Such is a minor glimpse of the humor that's used in the game. This is definitely a game I would recommend.

Once the game was installed, my 12 year old son really enjoyed Portal 2 (which is why it gets 2 stars). However, installing this game on my new PC running Windows 7 was a total nightmare. I spent about an hour trying to install "Steam" (which is the platform for this game) from the disc. I kept getting different cryptic errors displayed in popups (hidden behind the 0% progress bar). None of these errors helped me determine what the problem was. For example, one error was "out of disc space" despite having plenty of free disk space. Another error was "don't have administrator rights" when I had administrator rights. Finally, I gave up and downloaded Steam from the main website. This took about 45 minutes, but it worked. Once Steam was installed, it took 4 hours for the game to install from the disk (jeez). There have been other random problems with the Steam platform including more cryptic errors such as "file stored in the cloud is not the same version as the file stored on the PC". I do like the fact that the game runs without the disc being inserted, but the Steam platform is a disaster IMHO. Update - The program has stopped working altogether and I am getting a cryptic error from Steam. I will not by another product from Steam again and Amazon should require this company to actually allow you to install the software from the disc. Otherwise, there is no point in buying it from Amazon ... might as well just go to the Steam website and buy it from there.

Portal 2 plays very much like the original Portal with a few exceptions. I won't go too much into gameplay because the game really does feel very, very similar to the original, so I'll just lay down some of the differences I've perceived. *) Graphics and art. Portal 2's art style is different. Aperture Laboratories is in ruins, and Portal 2 puts you right into the heart of it. As a consequence, Portal 2 takes you all over the Aperture facility. You are not confined to specific test chambers like you were in Portal. The art style in Portal 2 seems, on account, more realistic than Portal. Lots of improvements in the small details. And, with respect to graphics, Portal 2 looks much smoother than Portal. Graphics improvements all around, from quality to performance. *) Humor. In my opinion, Portal 2 falls short of its predecessor in this department. This was expected. The running joke in Portal meshed well with the surprise in the ending credits to produce one of the most memorable experiences I've ever seen in a game. GLaDOS has not lost her wit in Portal 2, but, if you've played Portal, all the cards are on the table from the start of the game. *) Mystery. Portal was a curious beast. You woke up in a clearly dysfunctional laboratory, having no idea who you are or where you are, what you're supposed to do, or who that odd woman on the radio is. Portal 2 does not feature this intrigue. It's a puzzle game, first to last, and though some of the environments in Portal 2 do seem spooky, the feel is more reminiscent of a first-person zombie shooter, only without the zombies. Urrrrghhhh. *) Puzzles! Portal 2 has some far more involved puzzles over Portal, mostly on account of added toys for you to play with. Since the Portal series is, from A to Z, a set of puzzle games, this aspect is immensely important. Portal 2 does not disappoint with the ingenuity of its puzzles. I will say that, for me, the puzzles in Portal 2, though more numerous and interesting than the puzzles from Portal, are easier to figure out than they were in Portal. I'm not sure, though, if they're actually easier or if I just know what to look for from playing the original. Regardless, the puzzles are just more fun to play, what with the super speed slime and jump launchers. *) Content. This game has more puzzles than Portal, but I'm not convinced it has more content. Some of the puzzles in Portal took me hours to figure out, and I died many times. In Portal 2, I died once, and that was because I jumped in water just to see if I could swim. (I was convinced at that point it was impossible to die in the game unless you were playing with a blindfold.) The game took me about six hours, start to finish. Don't get me wrong, those six hours were full of fun and butterflies and rainbows, but retail price for the game is $50. There is not $50 worth of content here. Period. After having experienced it, I would not buy the game again for more than $20. Your mileage may vary. Overall, Portal 2 is a solid sequel to the original game. It's got it where it counts (the puzzles) and is certainly a good game, but it's burdened by a high price point and by the expectations raised by its predecessor. Multiplayer capability is the only aspect of this game that comes anywhere close to justifying the $50 price point, but I haven't tried it yet as I don't expect it to be challenging. (How hard can a puzzle be, where two average gamers who aren't communicating with voice chat should be able to solve it?) I give the game four stars in spite of its high price because the price will go down with time and because, ignoring the price, the game is a good game. While it has no laugh-out-loud end-game like Portal had, the voiceovers and puzzle elements will keep you chuckling and guessing every step of the way through Aperture Labs. Definitely a game worth playing.

Where the first Portal had a twitch-reflex fps-style feel to it in some areas, Portal 2 is settled firmly and fully in "puzzle game" territory. This is fine by me, as I never could get attached to FPSes in the first place. I really can't say anything about the story itself - I don't want to spoil anything for those who haven't finished the game yet! You're just gonna have to trust me on this one ;) - The gameplay is fun, the characters are engaging, the voice acting is perfect, the plot is brilliant, the pacing couldn't be better. And it's a nice kick-start for your brain. The dark comedy had me smiling, or outright laughing, all the way through. If you can't get enough of the puzzles, there's an active mapping community out there pumping out more deviousness. My only regret is the fact I didn't play the original Portal until after I finished Portal 2. Portal's a fantastic game on its own, but the sequel manages to be even better, in such a way that playing them out of order actually felt like a small let-down for me.

I gave this as a Christmas gift and I am really regretting that now. Actually, I'm rather mad at Amazon and the publisher for being deceptive about this product. The recipient has been unable to even install the game, on a system that more than met the system requirements listed on the product page. What was not listed was that they would need to have an Internet connection. They happen to have one, but the installation errors out because it cannot reach the publisher's game service, called Steam. Oh, it gets better. If we had gotten Steam to allow them to log in and see the Steam interface, we would have been led through entering the provided license key and then watching as the entire game would be downloaded from the Steam server. Even though we bought the game on disc and the Mac game files are all right there, on the disc! Oh, there's a workaround, which involves telling steam to restore a game from a backup and then pointing to the Portal 2 disc. But we can't even get that far. I am a user support professional, so I am very capable of providing phone support. But honestly, it's a game. It should just be as simple as insert disc, run installer, play game. That's the way it used to be. What was wrong with that? Too easy for customers? They needed to be challenged, even before playing the game? Stupid greedy publisher is more like it, trying to drive new installs of Steam and customers to buy more games online. They could have presented Steam as an optional install, but noooo.... So, according to Steam's support site, the likely problem is something is incompatible with the network ports they are using to communicate with their servers, and the Internet service provider my gift recipient is using. So all they need to do is change their ISP, and maybe they can play a single player puzzle game that comes on disc. What?! We tried all the other solutions to get Steam to let them log in to register the game. There is no security software to display. We turned off the built in firewall. We tried launching the game from the command line with the option to use TCP instead of UDP. We deleted the Application Support/Steam files and re-installed Steam. You might imagine my chagrin as I helped the gift recipient type in a command in the Terminal, just to play a game I gave them! I got this for someone using Mac os 10.6.8 on an Intel Core 2 Duo 2 iMac that plays Bioshock just fine. It's not the hardware, it's not the OS, it's not network settings, firewall or router configuration. It's certainly not just a Mac issue either, as I see now the other one and two star ratings from Windows users experiencing awful or impossible Portal 2 installs.

The original Portal was a great little add-on to Half-Life 2: Episode 2, but I wondered if it could stand on its own as a full retail release. Well, Portal 2 has been out a few days and I finished it tonight and my overall thoughts are "maybe?" The spectacle of a full-fledged singleplayer experience is there, but I'm not sure the variety is. Let's examine everything more closely... First off I did not play the cooperative online mode and likely never will. I am a singleplayer only gamer with rare exception (Battlefield, a little Enemy Territory back in the day) and bought Portal 2 for the supposedly 8-10 hour singleplayer campaign. This is a review of that campaign and let's get one thing out of the way right now: Portal 2 lasted me 6 hours total. From what I can tell your time with the campaign will vary greatly based on how easy you find the puzzles and for me personally I found them rather easy. That's not necessarily a bad thing though, overly hard puzzles may have annoyed me or made the game feel even more dragged out, which would have been a shame. In any event even at 6 hours I felt like the game pushed its concept a little long, so 6 hours is nothing to be mad about. Just judge the price you want to pay accordingly. On the actual gameplay front Portal 2 is pretty much Portal with some new puzzle mechanics. The different gels got a lot of pre-release hype and mostly for good reason since they add a lot of new ideas to the mix. Running off some speed gel into a portal to fly up high, then landing on bouncing gel to go even higher, never really gets old. There are also force fields, air cannons and these weird light tubes that make you float. Overall by the end of the game you will up to your ears in different puzzle mechanics and apparatuses that never bog you down in too much complexity and remain fun to mess with throughout. Sometimes you will go outside the typical test chamber but the puzzles remain the same fundamentally, there is no real significant variation in the themes and style of the original game. That goes doubly on the story front. I won't reveal any spoilers but suffice it to say Portal 2 treads normal sequel ground. Favorites are wedged into the story, the typical twists and allegiance changes take place and in the end it sticks closely to what made the original game work. Maybe I was wrong to expect more, but I went into Portal 2 hoping to see the cool portals mechanic from the original game expanded to a grander stage. Instead I feel like I just got more Portal, one test chamber and then another, despite some clever attempts to make it seem otherwise. Hopefully Portal 3 will change things up. On the graphics front Portal 2 uses Valve's Source Engine again and looks about as good as Half-Life 2: Episode 2 or Left 4 Dead. Some of the later sections really show off some large environments and cool design, but for the most part the game sticks close to the test chamber look of Portal. The PC version is perfectly done as one would expect of Valve, my only gripe with it being the very frequent and immersion-breaking loading screens. It's a really annoying blunder from an otherwise near-perfect development team to have a loading screen break up the action in a really jarring way repeatedly over the life of the game. The PC version also forces Steam of course, making you activate the game online and tie your game to an account Valve can cancel at any time. If I sound overly harsh don't take it that way. I thoroughly enjoyed the game, I was just somewhat disappointed by it. If you go into this game expecting the next Valve masterpiece I think you will be let down. If you go into it expecting more Portal then I think you will be very happy indeed. I was somewhere in the middle I guess, and suitably was left a bit confused at the end as to how much I enjoyed my time with it. I only paid $35 for the game (thanks amazon) so the shorter than expected length is not too much of a bother, but the limited scope of the game still grated on me a bit. The goal of all my reviews is more to inform than to judge though, so read over what I have said and decide for yourself what the singleplayer campaign is worth. I debated between a three or four star rating but in the end I feel Portal 2 rides the middle of my enjoyment-o-meter. Six more hours of Portal is a good time, it's just not the next big thing.