Portal 2 review

The past few weeks, a friend of mine was going mental over a new game that was meant to be coming out. This was Portal 2. I never heard of Portal before he became excited by it. It wasn't just him. A large amount of gamer friends on Facebook were all going mental over it. So I decided to download the first one. Portal 1 was great and I was really enjoying my play through of it... that was until I got to level 18 and found out that was the second last level. For a game I spent about an hour and a half on, it'd seem maddening that anyone would want to pay more than €20 on it. I left the Portal fanbase and deleted 1 from my Laptop. I didn't want 2 gigs of space being taken up by it. Then came the Portal 2 release date. More Portal spam for me then. Everyone was going game of the year, game of the year. I didn't get how a game could have improved so much. IGN was giving it high scores as was the community. Then after an hour of being bombarded with a friend telling me to play it, I downloaded it. This is my verdict...

Portal is about a woman named "Chelle", who has to participate in scientific testing in the "Arperture" science labs using portal technology. The technology in question is a gun, which allows you to fire portals to create new pathways for yourself and or objects. You must traverse through various test chambers with the sometimes questionable help of Wheatley, an Enclave Eye bot like robot ball. However all dosen't go to plan as Glados, the villain controlling Arperture in the first game is resurrected making escape from the facility by Chelle and Wheatley much more difficult. There isn't too much of an "Epic" story, It's no Red Dead, Final Fantasy or Bioshock but it is well written. There are a few twists but that isn't where it's quality comes from. The script is a comedy based one with very good jokes thrown in, even the blue screen of death makes an appearance at one point. I suppose this came down to having Stephen Merchant (Wheatley, also known for the Office (English Version)) play a part in it as he is a writer himself. J.K Simmons is also in it who is known better as the editor of the Daily Bugle in the Spiderman movies, J. Jonah Jameson.

The music is really well done. It's a unusual twist as to what soundtracks usually are. It's filled with Techno music. Not such a high pitched loola who's idea of music is chipmunks singing. It's techno in term of high tech computer noises which really add to the futuristic feel of the game. The music also changes depending on the situation. It gets more fast paced if you're detected by enemy robots or hurtling through the sky which I really liked.

Now as I said, the idea of Portal is that it's a puzzle game where you use a portal gun to open path ways previously un-reachable. It was simple in the first game seeing as there was only you and the occasional cube that passed through it. However in this game there is force fields, magnetic fields, repulsion fields, Blue bouncy goo, Orange speedy glue and white portal amplification goo which only makes puzzle results more varied and the puzzles themselves more difficult. Earlier on I mentioned how I rejected Portal one for the insanely short length of it. Portal 2 has fixed that tremendously. The length has gone from 1 and a half hours to 9 times the length of the original. So that aspect of the game-play was fixed. There is one thing I didn't like about the game that I didn't like in Portal 1. The camera. The camera in this game is the worst i've seen in a long time. People are probably confused as to how a first person game can have a bad camera. When jumping through Portals I found it flew around uncontrollably and really just made it awkward to play.

So in conclusion, what did I like/ dislike about this game see below...

What I liked

1. Comedic Script
2. Ingenious yet simple idea
3. After 9 hours keeps you interested
4. Good story with plenty twists

What I disliked8

1. Camera is still messed up (IMO)

This game was truly great and has completly changed my opinion about the Portal franchise after the bad taste Portal 1 left in my mouth. The game lured me in with it's hilarious script that was lurking around in the portal 1 script. This is a great game and I will be buying it for my ps3 ASAP

This game is getting a

9/10

I don't want to jump on the band wagon but everyone is giving this game close to 8 to 9 out of 10 and I agree. It's B-R-illiant.