Portal is a funny game, but Portal 2 is possibly the funniest game ever made.įrom the first scene, where Chell is awoken from enforced slumber to jump around a bit for “exercise” and “appreciate” some art, Portal 2 delivers a solid 10 hours of riotous comedy. While Portal 2 can’t match the innovation of the original, it does find ways to improve upon some of its other features. That said, criticising a game for failing to reinvent the wheel is pretty harsh. They are not a new physics-defying tool for the player to freely wield. The lasers and the light-bridges and the gels are all excellent contributors to Portal 2’s more advanced puzzling, but that’s all they do. ![]() Indeed, if Portal 2 has a flaw, it’s the inability to conjure a mechanic that’s equally good. ![]() But the way Portal 2 unpacks that box without breaking the content makes it every bit as good as the game it’s based upon.Īs a sequel, the biggest hurdle Portal 2 faces is that while it features the exact same mechanical magic as the first game, it can’t make you feel the way you did about it when you first connected two points in space with a gun that makes holes (not bullet holes, but, well, you’ll figure it out). I agree that Portal is close to flawless, a precisely packaged little box of a game. The main reason Portal is deemed perfect is because it is short, making it seem a pristine little gem in a medium that so often prioritises bigness. I’ve played both Portals a lot over the last couple of years, because my daughter loves them, and I’m confident in saying what I was too cowardly to say back in 2011, that the second game is better. Why the hell wouldn’t Valve do it with Portal? It did it with Left4Dead (which everyone thought was a terrible idea before they played it). Sequels stand or fall on their own merit, and if there’s any developer that can make a sequel to a game that doesn’t need one, it’s Valve. And yet it got one anyway, which also turned out to be one of the best films ever made. But Alien is a perfect horror film and doesn’t need a sequel. ![]() Making a sequel to Portal, it seemed, was like making a sequel to cake. It had an innovative concept, puzzles that bent both space and your mind, a story that punched far above its weight, and a witty script that introduced one of gaming’s most iconic baddies. Certainly, few games exhibit such watertight design as Valve’s experimental puzzler, which stole the show of the Orange Box when it released in 2007. Portal didn’t need a sequel, it was said, because Portal is a perfect game.
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