Portal 2 (PS3)

Against all odds, I managed to go seven years without severely spoiling Portal 2 for myself.  If by some miracle you have no idea what this series is, go play Portal and Portal 2 in that order, and then come back here once you have.  Both are $10 on Steam.  Just because the version I played was for the PS3 doesn’t mean you need a PS3 to play it.  This review can certainly wait.

Portal 2 wasn’t anything I’d ever planned to play or have access to, but my summer vacation ended up relocated because of an unforeseen natural disaster.  The rental property my sister randomly picked for all of us at the last minute came with a Playstation 3 in the basement and a pretty awful lineup of licensed schlock in its game library…well, an awful lineup of licensed schlock and Portal 2.  Since my aunt is just as much of a drunk as she was fifteen years ago, I knew there would be nothing good upstairs for as long as the booze cooler was stocked.  I’d have to keep busy with Portal 2 until she sobered up.

She never sobered up, and I regret nothing about spending my entire trip playing video games in the basement.  That game was amazing.

Admittedly, there wasn’t enough time for me to even touch the co-op mode, and it’s probably for the better, since there was only one controller, the PS3 wasn’t hooked up to the Internet, and everyone else in the lodge was smashed.  I’ve read that it’s completely different, so if the opportunity to play it ever arises, you can bet your ass I’ll do a follow-up review for it specifically.

With regards to the single-player story…did you like the original Portal for the gameplay?  2 introduces new mechanics and has more than twice as many puzzles!   Like it for GLaDOS?  She’s back and gets character development!  Did Cave Johnson’s lemons speech bring you here?  Play the game and it’ll give you some much-needed context for that, and plenty of other gems like it!  If you’ve played the original, then there is no excuse–you should absolutely play the sequel, and you probably did back in 2011.

I wasn’t completely sold on this until Chell fell into the pit at the end of the first arc.  Once I realized where I was headed, though, I was hooked and wanted to just learn as much as I could about the labs.  The new gameplay elements were easy to figure out, even the white gel, which was a little intimidating at first because the thought of being able to put a portal anywhere could potentially break a lot of puzzles or confuse the crap out of someone who didn’t know what they were doing if it had been implemented haphazardly.

The ending was one of the best parts.  Without spoiling the unicorns and small children out there who didn’t listen to me and kept scrolling despite not knowing much about Portal in general, it gives you closure.  There’s really no dire need to make a Portal 3, as much as there are people out there who may want it.  I’d rather have a finished game series that ended after only a few installments than one that’s been left with a cliffhanger ending for what’s soon going to be twenty years, with no sign of any resolution in sight.

Ellen McLain was as fantastic as always, even though from what I’ve read about her, she’d probably give all the credit to everyone else who worked on the game.  I’ve pretty much exclusively heard nice things about her from people who have met her in person.  She sings at least three times in Portal 2, and in the years that have passed since its initial release, another GLaDOS song surfaced in Lego Dimensions that provides some great follow-up to the events of this game.

I’m giving Portal 2 an unsurprising

It was a fantastic way to spend the first legitimate vacation I’ve been on in years.  However, I do not recommend ever trying to get a job at Aperture Science.  It isn’t terribly human-friendly, even if its overlord is hilarious.  It’s not even robot-friendly.  Try to keep this one concretely in the realm of fiction, Portal fanatics.