Portal 2

Hole-y games. Portal 2 seems to be a dissection of sarcasm and context sensitive interaction, but at the heart of the personality imbued upon the game by the actors and artists within, much of the experience falls flat and misses what made the original so compelling. Portal 2 starts out with the same adept silliness that the original managed, but slowly becomes a prolonged trudge through the stories of two characters who weren’t really interesting as stories as much as comic relief. The problem is basically one where side-characters inexplicably become main characters and suddenly the writer decided that filling them in would be less awkward.

The result is two characters who are awkward caricatures and a silent protagonist who we still have no information about. Frankly, neither of these characters are bad characters, but everything stretches thin and the silliness has this almost rubber-band like progression from being acceptable, to stupid, and back into the range of acceptable. These swings oftentimes feel like they were a result of multiple writers, despite the characters still having a cohesion that is probably better than most characters; at the very least GLaDos will always be more personable than any Mass Effect or Dragon Age character, though that’s not much of an achievement.

If I’m being realistic, character is really what sells this game. The actual difficulty within the game, one of exploration and navigation, is somewhat paper-thin. There are some areas that are annoyingly simplistic, and others which are just simplistic, but there’s never a great deal of information gleaned from any given space. Each area has a clear environment and atmosphere, but they all collectively feel sterile and boring, and the complete lack of exploration, short of using debug commands, makes the game less a delight for the senses and more a linear wasteland, despite the impression of expansive space.

The Portal gun is still an interesting tool, and provides lots of distinct opportunities for doing interesting things, but the ability to play with these is limited to a far greater degree than in the past. What made the original interesting often came in the form of sequence breaking and feeling more like a rat breaking out of a maze; yet here the maze is too obvious. The excitement of trying to best the maze is somewhat lessened and escape loses its credo without freedom being the crux of operation.

Portal 2 is a wasteland, a desert of metal and one-liners, subsidized by an occasional environment which isn’t a stale impression of a previous game. Escaping Portal 2 is not a thrilling escapade as much as a sometimes amusing romp through the looking-glass of rampant AIs. Despite their lovable silliness, the characters seem as if they’re bored with the process by the end and that, at least, makes a good deal of sense.

Recommended: No