Cake at Last: Portal 2

I'd never played the original Portal so I came to this series somewhat wary of what to expect. After downloading it off Steam I'm happy to report it's one of the most exciting and fun games I've ever played.

You wake up in a hotel room, complete some basic exercises and return to bed. You wake up to find everything decrepit and yourself being whisked to safety by a caring, if slightly hapless robot called Wheatley. Having been rescued, you are set loose in test environments for a huge corporation that are overrun with foliage and find a gun, which creates portals in the walls and is used to solve spatial problems, mainly involving cubes to escape from the sentient, sarcastic guardian, GLaDOS.

Sounds exciting huh? Well at its best Portal 2 is a game that totaly, utterly engrosses. The puzzles are well thought out and the portal gun at its best simply makes you feel dizzy, like a Neanderthal next to an MRI scanner. In additional to the superb gameplay, Portal 2 is funny. Stephen Merchant, he of Extras and The Ricky Gervais Show voices Wheatley with a brilliant mixture of enthusiasm and incompetence; Ellen McLain reprises her role as GLaDOS to superb effect (you will never look at potatoes in the same way again).

The extent of the levels means that you will have a good 10+ hours of gameplay (by my admittedly slow standards) and also there is co-op mode, with two portal guns, which gives the sort of fun that should really be illegal. Portal 2 is a worthy addition to your collection and it gave me the most fun I've had playing games for a long period of time.

Cieran Douglass While Portal was awesome, it was still, I feel, more of a demo. It was short, and the mechanics were relatively limited. Portal 2 expands considerably upon the original, to make one of the most fun games I've played in years. It's still not hugely long (to complete single-player and co-op will take about 15 hours), but those hours are a lot of fun, and very entertaining.

The core gameplay of course hasn't changed. You shoot portals, they connect to each other. The most notable change, however, is that there's much more characterisation this time. In Portal, you were the test subject, GLaDOS was the omnipotent and malevolent computer. It was a dual-act. Portal 2 introduces Wheatley, a personality core who wakes you up from stasis in order to escape the facility. Most of his Bristolian lines (novel in a US video game) are hilarious. I can't say much more without spoiling the game, but suffice to say, Wheatley was one of my favourite parts of the game.

Another particularly enjoyable part is when you are thrust deep into the bowels of Aperture Science and into abandoned test chambers. These sections, presided over by recordings of Aperture founder Cave Johnson are brilliant, and expertly chart the corporate history of the morally dubious corporation (as well as hinting at events in the Half-Life series). This is to say nothing of the co-op sections of the game, where you play as two (surprisingly expressive) robots, completing test chambers for GlaDOS, and in her words “saving science”. If you have the game, you absolutely have to find a “testing partner” and play the co-op.

By the end of the year, Portal 2 will doubtless have received countless Game-of-the-year awards, and rightly so. While for the games length its price may be relatively high, consider that it's no shorter than your average Call of Duty title, and far more enjoyable and entertaining. The three-and- a-half-year wait was definitely worth it.

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