here is the review:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/v ... eview.html
and im copying the Text into this spoiler so you guys can have that too.
Spoiler! :
Video games have always been a mix of the mechanical and the artistic; striving to achieve a perfect marriage between form and function. They are an entertainment so often defined on their surface qualities – how they look, how many modes they have, how convincingly that guy falls over when you smack him with the butt of your gun.
But what really underpins the best games is so often unseen. The invisible hand of direction that gently guides you into a world so carefully built, introducing you to the lore and mechanics of a game so deftly you barely even notice it. Making sure you know what you’re meant to be doing, that you never get lost, and are always looking in the right direction when there’s something worth seeing.
Portal 2 is the new standard to which this approach is set. It’s a work of masterful craft, mechanically constructed with military precision, artistically wrapped in a tremendous story and environment. Most impressively, its achievements feel effortless. The first game was a small, but perfectly formed surprise. The first-person puzzler was a component part of The Orange Box, an apparent complement to Half-Life 2 and its episodes. But the first time you punched two holes through separate surfaces with your portal gun, stepped through one and out of the other, Portal took on a life of its own. The deranged robotic keeper of the Aperture labs, GLaDOS, became one of gaming’s most compelling villains. It managed to get people attached to an inanimate cube. It had the best end credits song of all time. It was funny, smart, fresh and managed to feel like the plucky, accidental hero.
If there was any truth to that, there’s certainly nothing accidental about Portal 2. Its breezy –if destructive-- opening re-introduces the core concept of the portal gun and the Aperture Enrichment Center’s test chambers, reacquainting veterans while gently initiating newbies. It’s a tutorial, but it never feels like one, contained within the crumbling walls of a malfunctioning test center and decorated with pithy quips from a recorded message system and Wheatley, your spherical robotic companion voiced by Stephen Merchant. It’s a brilliant learning curve of direction, rather than instruction, nudging you towards the solution while teaching you how everything works without ever explicitly telling you. It’s elegant and makes you feel right at home, demonstrating just how clever and enjoyable Portal 2’s most basic mechanics are.
But the core toolset was mastered in the first game and, this being a sequel, there is a whole slew of new mind-bending tricks up the newly awakened GLaDOS’s metal sleeve. Each new mechanic is introduced with the same level of eloquence the opening of the game manages, and it’s a theme that runs through Portal 2’s entirety. A design ethos that is supremely generous, but dealt with marvellous economy. It would be a shame to go into too much detail about each addition, as the surprise is a big part of their appeal. But each is brilliantly dextrous, able to supply a number of mind-bending possibilities to each test chamber –particularly as they start to weave together later on in the game. And of course, the new mechanics are all built around the gun you hold in your hands, complementing the use of portals with their own specific traits. You'll thread laser beams through portals, use hard light as barriers or walkways and use the gel introduced about halfway through to alter the physical properties of surfaces altogether.
The gel is Portal 2's most radical addition, found belching from funnels scattered around the enrichment centre. Blue 'repulsion gel' turns any surface it's splattered on into a handy trampoline, orange 'propulsion gel' allows you to skate at high speed across it, leading to jumps and portal related momentum leaps. While the white 'conversion gel' is a perfect conductor for portals, meaning you can splash it over a wall that you previously couldn't punch a hole through and convert it into another exit.
Like everything else introduced in Portal 2, the gel fits the game's core mechanic with careful efficiency. As it is liquid, it can flow or even gush through a specifically placed portal to set up Rube Goldberg-esque assault courses across the more cavernous test chambers. One of Portal 2's greatest achievements is that simply mucking around is enjoyable in and of itself. Many chambers can be real head-scratchers, making that tantalising exit high in the corner feel light years away. But you rarely feel stuck without hope. Every failed experiment is just another step towards revealing a puzzle's secrets, and when that revelatory moment comes, it's often greeted with genuine belly laughs at the simple deviousness of it all. And just at the moment you think you have a mechanic all figured out, Valve throw something new at you, pulling the rug from under your feet and asking you to learn something new. It's beautifully paced, often diverting you away from the chambers and into the belly of the laboratory itself among crumbling walls, steel girders and thumping pistons. In truth, these diversions are slightly less engaging than the chambers themselves in terms of puzzling, but they offer a sharp change of tempo and advance the story on its merry way.
Portal 2's 'plot', such as it is, is a simple one: escape the facility. But the journey, as ever with Valve, is the worthier part. The razor-sharp dialogue is constantly funny, particularly in the way that the frantic, nervous babble of Wheatley contrasts so effectively with the clinical, sinister goading from GLaDOS. But the two are never overbearing, flitting in and out of the game and knowing when to shut up and leave you to the puzzles.
Valve also have an uncanny knack of involving your mute protagonist Chell, simply by making the world react to her presence in a startlingly organic way. Repeat plays may show just how well-oiled and precise it all is when you're looking under the hood, but that first run-through is constantly surprising. Particularly as Valve fill in the details surrounding the mysterious Aperture, leading to an achievement of world-building that compares favourably with BioShock's underwater city of Rapture. But those puzzles that form the heart of the game endure, right up to its frantic, maniacally brilliant conclusion.
Then there's the co-op campaign, which can be played in splitscreen or online. You and a partner play as two droids, P-body and Atlas, a Laurel and Hardy-esque pairing built by GLaDOS specifically for testing in Aperture's labs. The co-op is built around the same tenets and machinations as the single-player, but the addition of a partner (and thus an extra two portals to play with) quickly morphs the mode into something entirely distinct. Unlike many co-op modes, the feeling is definitely one of working together, rather than simply alongside one another. Whether you are split by glass partitions, or you're working closely together, you'll need a constant stream of communication to solve each test chamber. You'll pass blocks through portals to each other, set up elaborate portal chains and one test early on has one player controlling heavy blocks on a shifting rat maze, while the other player must negotiate the area. It's ever so easy to step on the wrong button and squish your partner into scrap, but they're quickly reassembled and thrown back into the game.
It's a terrific game for an expert/newcomer combination, as you can easily decide the roles each player will take on during a puzzle, the more experienced of the two either carrying the load or guiding from the sidelines. Everything is tailor-made for two, but just like the singleplayer, there's a remarkable generosity of imagination.
And that's Portal 2, a game that gleefully throws new ideas at a core concept and makes them stick. For sheer design, it's only competition is Super Mario Galaxy 2. In the same way that Nintendo build playgrounds around Mario, Portal 2 crafts its world so that the star is always that piece of equipment in your hands. A diverse piece of engineering that opens up staggering possibilities, sometimes supplemented by just a box, a button and a door. Then Valve wrap it all up in their astute understanding of video game storytelling, providing a world and characters that stick in the mind even after those credits roll. Funny, clever, mentally stimulating and always good honest fun, Portal 2 effortlessly represents the medium at its very best.
But what really underpins the best games is so often unseen. The invisible hand of direction that gently guides you into a world so carefully built, introducing you to the lore and mechanics of a game so deftly you barely even notice it. Making sure you know what you’re meant to be doing, that you never get lost, and are always looking in the right direction when there’s something worth seeing.
Portal 2 is the new standard to which this approach is set. It’s a work of masterful craft, mechanically constructed with military precision, artistically wrapped in a tremendous story and environment. Most impressively, its achievements feel effortless. The first game was a small, but perfectly formed surprise. The first-person puzzler was a component part of The Orange Box, an apparent complement to Half-Life 2 and its episodes. But the first time you punched two holes through separate surfaces with your portal gun, stepped through one and out of the other, Portal took on a life of its own. The deranged robotic keeper of the Aperture labs, GLaDOS, became one of gaming’s most compelling villains. It managed to get people attached to an inanimate cube. It had the best end credits song of all time. It was funny, smart, fresh and managed to feel like the plucky, accidental hero.
If there was any truth to that, there’s certainly nothing accidental about Portal 2. Its breezy –if destructive-- opening re-introduces the core concept of the portal gun and the Aperture Enrichment Center’s test chambers, reacquainting veterans while gently initiating newbies. It’s a tutorial, but it never feels like one, contained within the crumbling walls of a malfunctioning test center and decorated with pithy quips from a recorded message system and Wheatley, your spherical robotic companion voiced by Stephen Merchant. It’s a brilliant learning curve of direction, rather than instruction, nudging you towards the solution while teaching you how everything works without ever explicitly telling you. It’s elegant and makes you feel right at home, demonstrating just how clever and enjoyable Portal 2’s most basic mechanics are.
But the core toolset was mastered in the first game and, this being a sequel, there is a whole slew of new mind-bending tricks up the newly awakened GLaDOS’s metal sleeve. Each new mechanic is introduced with the same level of eloquence the opening of the game manages, and it’s a theme that runs through Portal 2’s entirety. A design ethos that is supremely generous, but dealt with marvellous economy. It would be a shame to go into too much detail about each addition, as the surprise is a big part of their appeal. But each is brilliantly dextrous, able to supply a number of mind-bending possibilities to each test chamber –particularly as they start to weave together later on in the game. And of course, the new mechanics are all built around the gun you hold in your hands, complementing the use of portals with their own specific traits. You'll thread laser beams through portals, use hard light as barriers or walkways and use the gel introduced about halfway through to alter the physical properties of surfaces altogether.
The gel is Portal 2's most radical addition, found belching from funnels scattered around the enrichment centre. Blue 'repulsion gel' turns any surface it's splattered on into a handy trampoline, orange 'propulsion gel' allows you to skate at high speed across it, leading to jumps and portal related momentum leaps. While the white 'conversion gel' is a perfect conductor for portals, meaning you can splash it over a wall that you previously couldn't punch a hole through and convert it into another exit.
Like everything else introduced in Portal 2, the gel fits the game's core mechanic with careful efficiency. As it is liquid, it can flow or even gush through a specifically placed portal to set up Rube Goldberg-esque assault courses across the more cavernous test chambers. One of Portal 2's greatest achievements is that simply mucking around is enjoyable in and of itself. Many chambers can be real head-scratchers, making that tantalising exit high in the corner feel light years away. But you rarely feel stuck without hope. Every failed experiment is just another step towards revealing a puzzle's secrets, and when that revelatory moment comes, it's often greeted with genuine belly laughs at the simple deviousness of it all. And just at the moment you think you have a mechanic all figured out, Valve throw something new at you, pulling the rug from under your feet and asking you to learn something new. It's beautifully paced, often diverting you away from the chambers and into the belly of the laboratory itself among crumbling walls, steel girders and thumping pistons. In truth, these diversions are slightly less engaging than the chambers themselves in terms of puzzling, but they offer a sharp change of tempo and advance the story on its merry way.
Portal 2's 'plot', such as it is, is a simple one: escape the facility. But the journey, as ever with Valve, is the worthier part. The razor-sharp dialogue is constantly funny, particularly in the way that the frantic, nervous babble of Wheatley contrasts so effectively with the clinical, sinister goading from GLaDOS. But the two are never overbearing, flitting in and out of the game and knowing when to shut up and leave you to the puzzles.
Valve also have an uncanny knack of involving your mute protagonist Chell, simply by making the world react to her presence in a startlingly organic way. Repeat plays may show just how well-oiled and precise it all is when you're looking under the hood, but that first run-through is constantly surprising. Particularly as Valve fill in the details surrounding the mysterious Aperture, leading to an achievement of world-building that compares favourably with BioShock's underwater city of Rapture. But those puzzles that form the heart of the game endure, right up to its frantic, maniacally brilliant conclusion.
Then there's the co-op campaign, which can be played in splitscreen or online. You and a partner play as two droids, P-body and Atlas, a Laurel and Hardy-esque pairing built by GLaDOS specifically for testing in Aperture's labs. The co-op is built around the same tenets and machinations as the single-player, but the addition of a partner (and thus an extra two portals to play with) quickly morphs the mode into something entirely distinct. Unlike many co-op modes, the feeling is definitely one of working together, rather than simply alongside one another. Whether you are split by glass partitions, or you're working closely together, you'll need a constant stream of communication to solve each test chamber. You'll pass blocks through portals to each other, set up elaborate portal chains and one test early on has one player controlling heavy blocks on a shifting rat maze, while the other player must negotiate the area. It's ever so easy to step on the wrong button and squish your partner into scrap, but they're quickly reassembled and thrown back into the game.
It's a terrific game for an expert/newcomer combination, as you can easily decide the roles each player will take on during a puzzle, the more experienced of the two either carrying the load or guiding from the sidelines. Everything is tailor-made for two, but just like the singleplayer, there's a remarkable generosity of imagination.
And that's Portal 2, a game that gleefully throws new ideas at a core concept and makes them stick. For sheer design, it's only competition is Super Mario Galaxy 2. In the same way that Nintendo build playgrounds around Mario, Portal 2 crafts its world so that the star is always that piece of equipment in your hands. A diverse piece of engineering that opens up staggering possibilities, sometimes supplemented by just a box, a button and a door. Then Valve wrap it all up in their astute understanding of video game storytelling, providing a world and characters that stick in the mind even after those credits roll. Funny, clever, mentally stimulating and always good honest fun, Portal 2 effortlessly represents the medium at its very best.
