CHENNAI: When Portal 2 was announced, my reaction was somewhere between ‘YAY!’ and ‘...why?’. The former because, well, one of my favourite games of all time was getting a sequel; and the latter because I wasn’t sure it really needed one.
The original Portal was a gem of a game — it didn’t try too many things, but what it did, it did amazingly. A triumph of game-making as much as of gaming, the only complaint I had about it was that it was over all too quickly. And so we come to Portal 2.
Without going into too much detail, you’ll play as original protagonist Chell once again; and, once again, you’ll have to survive whatever the Aperture Science Enrichment Center can throw at you. But a number of things have changed since the events of the first game, and you’ll just have to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes for yourself.
Part of what made Portal so great was how stripped-down it was — you had just the single character with dialogue and boy, that was some dialogue! GLaDOS was easily one of the most memorable villains ever written in gaming, and so how would Portal 2 tackle the tricky problem of going one step beyond? Turns out it would do so with aplomb by adding just a couple of wonderful new characters, and retaining the characteristic quirk that made the first one so beloved. The pacing of Portal 2 also feels just right, with a much more palpable sense of progression than the original game; not surprising, given that you’ve got a lot more content to sink your teeth into this time.
Mechanically, Portal 2 doesn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken. Thinking with portals is still as much fun as it was back in 2008, and that remains at the heart of the sequel’s gameplay. However, the test chambers have been given a real overhaul and are a massive upgrade on the original game. Portal 2’s biggest new feature is gels, which modify the properties of whichever surface you apply them to, and they slot in so seamlessly alongside the portal mechanics that it’s like they were there from the very beginning. Overall, it’s a wonderfully seamless blend of old and new.
However, that isn’t all that’s new, because Portal 2 also introduced a multiplayer co-op mode. In it, two players will play the roles of Atlas and P-Body, robots who GLaDOS has built and tasked with overcoming special purpose-built chambers. Is Portal an obvious fit for a multiplayer game? No, and that’s what makes it even more surprising that it’s an absolute blast. Seriously, this is phenomenal and you should be playing this as soon as you’re done with the story.
It’s a common belief that there’s no such thing as the perfect sequel — no follow-up can possibly live up to the quality and goodwill engendered by the first entry in a series. Portal 2 begs to differ — as good as the first one was, it’s bigger, better and just all-around more awesome.
Arjun Sukumaran
http://goo.gl/uNBWN3
(Arjun is a gamer, book lover and an all-round renaissance man)