Portal 2 Review
Posted 04/20/11 at 8:38 PM by Hamlet
This started out as a forum post giving my comments on Portal 2, but (surprise) it got kind of long, so now I'm just basically posting it as a review. This mainly concerns the single-player content; I'll be trying the co-op in a few days when my girlfriend is less busy, so I'll probably post about that later. There are no story spoilers for Portal 2.
Portal
First, a look back at the first Portal, which gives important context to understanding Portal 2. Portal was mainly divided into 4 segments, each of which provided an important function in the overall experience:
1) Training/tutorial (Missions 0 through 12). This portal mechanic is brand new and people have to learn to work with it. The fundamentals of "thinking with portals" are introduced sequentially. If you play through the developers' commentary in Portal, it will increase your appreciation for how important and well-crafted this part of the game was.
2) The basic puzzle rooms (Missions 13 to 18). You apply what you've learned in a series of self-contained puzzle rooms. This is where the first game really starts to come alive. Notably, there's little interrupting the puzzling--just some periodic VO from Glados as you move around. Each puzzle is a self-contained unit and you do them one after the other.
3) The story level (Mission 19 and the escape sequence). This part has a few interesting features. There's little serious puzzling. The challenges are more of the platform jumping variety, and you mostly just have to find your way from one room to the next by locating the portal-able sections of wall. The whole thing is a sort of proof-of-concept that Portal can work outside of the stark white environments of the "testing rooms," but it's important to focus on how the gameplay here is different from the rest of the game, since this informs the upcoming discussion of Portal 2.
4) Advanced and challenge levels. This is where you go back to the puzzle rooms, 13 to 18, and try to refine your skills. You play both a "hard mode" of each level, and an challenge version where you try to optimize your clear time or number of portals used. This section serves a number of functions:
--It lets you keep trying to improve. There's always room to improve your times on each level by mastering more complicated tricks. Even though level 19 of Portal isn't very hard (the portaling skills you picked up in 13 through 18 are more than enough to get through), the challenges give you place to get better at Portal and be rewarded for it.
--The puzzles were designed with these challenges in mind. When revisiting the puzzle rooms, there are entire alternate solutions to various rooms that, when you find them, essentially make you feel like you're playing new content. In many cases, it's clear that the alternate solutions were intended by the designers (because obtaining the "gold" time on each level requires using them). This not only gives an enormous appreciation for the skill that went into designing them, but gives the player a very rewarding feeling of progress. The first time you saw a puzzle you were just happy to make it to the end, but when you go back to it with more experience at Portal, you see possibilities that completely escaped you the first time, and the "basic" solutions appear primitive.
--It gives replay value. Sort of redundant with the above point, but I want to emphasize that each puzzle is a self-contained unit which you can load up, think about as a whole, and try to plot a better path through. When you're done with the story, you have a way to play more Portal other than simply playing through the story again.
Portal 2
On to Portal 2. When you first start, the most striking difference from its predecessor is the richness of the environment. Portal mostly took place in the aforementioned square white rooms, and most of Portal 2 is spent in much more fully fleshed-out environments. The benefits of this are obvious. There's far more room for an immersive setting for story. And Valve takes full advantage, showing us a much bigger part of the Aperture Science world that we saw in the first game. The writing is tremendously entertaining, the new characters have great voice acting, and the levels are full of little details that just add to experience. Much like the little side rooms in the first game with their "cake is a lie" graffiti that added huge depth to the game world, the environments in Portal 2 go even further and bring Aperture to life.
The gameplay mostly has two modes. The first are "puzzle room" set pieces that are much like the first game (but with more variety in terms of flavor and setting). There are new puzzle pieces to play with (many of which were previewed in videos, but not all). Each new object is introduced with an easy puzzle that basically demonstrates the mechanics. As in the first game, Valve introduces you to each new toy by handing it to you in a carefully-crafted teaching environment, and again they do it extremely well. Even though the game has no manual or explicit tutorial, and has a bunch of new interacting pieces, you'll never be confused about what things do.
Once you've been shown a new object, you have to use it in some increasingly-elaborate puzzles (usually in conjunction with the objects from earlier in the game). These are the meat of the game. And they're a ton of fun to work through the first time--again, this is the payoff of a puzzle game like this: applying what you've learned. To analogize back to the first Portal above, these rooms very nicely fulfill the role of section 2: the main puzzles where you apply your increasing competence at the game. I would say they fill that role well, with only one criticism. Overall, the puzzles feel less freeform than in the first game. Most visibly, there are often a lot less portal-able walls and more "metal" walls, which often makes the path through the puzzle feel a bit more railroaded. It's a subtle complaint, because even in the first game, you were ultimately going to put portals in the "right" places and then move on. But I couldn't escape the distinct feeling that I was being given fewer options and was always being led towards a certain solution. I'd be curious to see if other people felt the same way.
The second main type of gameplay are what I'll call the narrative sequences. You move through the innards of the Aperture facility on a pre-set path, with frequent dialogue and minimal serious puzzling. It's basically a greatly expanded take on part 3 of Portal, but interspersed through the game instead of all being at the end. And it mostly plays out the same way, with the important note that the dialogue and story are much more elaborate than in the first game. Even though I'm focusing mostly on the gameplay here, I want to stress again that Valve really did one-up themselves on the story and immersion aspects, and you'll never resent the parts of the game that are more devoted to exposition. They do try hard to break up the "running down a catwalk" feel of these parts of the game--usually you at least have to portal from one spot to another pretty frequently, and occasionally have to perform a more nontrivial task. But all of these are mostly a tool for increasing immersion that serious obstacles that take a lot of effort to overcome. In the best moments, the silent player character is an active participant in the dialogue by virtue of moving objects around in a way that completes the scene. Ultimately though, these stretches of the game are narrative in function.
So what we have is Portal 1, but with the tutorial, puzzle, and narrative aspects all expanded and interleaved together. A lot of complexity is added to both the story and the gameplay. In short, it's just what we all expected, and brought off extremely well. If you liked Portal, as so many people did, you will have a great time playing through Portal 2.
So what's missing?
I outlined the various parts of the first Portal in the first section to give context to everything I'm saying about Portal 2. In particular, the description of part 4--the difficult puzzles and challenges--was long, as I discussed why it was such an important part of the experience of the first game. So far I've discussed how Portal 2 provides parts 1-3 and improves on them. The big problem with Portal 2 for me, then, is part 4. It's not there at all.
I've played through the Portal 1 story 3 or 4 times in the few years it's been out, taking ~1 hour each time (except the first). In contrast, I've spent many times that number of hours on the "challenge" content, getting better at the game and learning new tricks with portals and cubes. As anyone who's also done this knows, you barely scratch the surface of portaling techniques in the process of merely playing through the story. To me it was like Starcraft: you play the single-player campaign to take in a fun story and learn the basics of how to play, and then you move on to an environment (in this example, the multiplayer game), where you really start exploring the game's potential. Portal would not have been nearly the same for me without the time I spent playing with portals and understanding how to do more with them.
And that's what makes Portal 2 feel, for me, terribly incomplete. They've taken the world of portals, buttons, and cubes, and thrown in laser beams, catapults, various gels, anti-gravity tubes, and more. I want to explore all these things in the same way that I did the first game, and the opportunity's not there. You do a few relatively straightforward puzzles with each one and then the game ends (with a hilarious story along the way). To be clear, playing through the Portal 2 story is a little harder than playing through the Portal 1 story (because there are so many more different bits to worry about). But it's much, much easier than achieving a decent score at the Portal 1 challenge missions. If you spend any appreciable amount of time on those, then Portal 2 will not be very hard for you. That would be fine if it had a follow-up of any kind, but it doesn't.
This isn't a complaint about the length of the game, or about its value and price. It's not about feeling entitled to more game than I got. I give the game a lot more respect than that. It's not like a high school essay assignment--I'm not telling the designers, "you have to give me X hours minimum." I'm saying that, at whatever length, the game should feel like a complete work. It's puzzle game, so it should introduce mechanics and then explore them. To press the point, Portal 1 did this more than satisfactorily, and it was a much shorter game. Portal 2 may have a wonderful story, but as a game--it has a great beginning and then simply cuts off halfway through.
Just to address one final point, I know people are going to say, "but can't you do all those things anyway?". The answer is: not really. Yes, I can go back to each level and try to find better solutions. And I will do exactly that, in fact, but it won't be the same. In Portal, when I went to the challenge menu and selected mission 13, Least Portals, and the gold medal requirement was 4, that was a message from the designer. It was basically a note from him to me saying, "I know you've played through this level already, but if you look harder, there's a way to do it with only 4 portals. See if you can find it." Eventually I did, using a totally new path through the level, and it was as though I was playing new content. Replaying Portal 2 and saying, "let's see if I can do this room again and cut out the extraneous portals" will be kind of fun, but in contrast, it won't be a whole new game. Add to this the fact that there's no supported challenge mode so the only way to play is to replay the story (where all the narrative sequences amount to unstoppable cutscenes)--I'd literally have to make myself a library of save files at each puzzle room. As I've already said, it's not the same.
Conclusion
What Portal 2 does, it does brilliantly. But it is an incomplete experience. It's extremely frustrating how the game introduces so many new toys but gives no avenue to explore their possibilities in a deep way. The few hours I spent playing through the game were thoroughly enjoyable, but all in all expect to spend less time with it than I did with the first Portal, and that's an unexpected disappointment in a game and series with so much potential.
Portal
First, a look back at the first Portal, which gives important context to understanding Portal 2. Portal was mainly divided into 4 segments, each of which provided an important function in the overall experience:
1) Training/tutorial (Missions 0 through 12). This portal mechanic is brand new and people have to learn to work with it. The fundamentals of "thinking with portals" are introduced sequentially. If you play through the developers' commentary in Portal, it will increase your appreciation for how important and well-crafted this part of the game was.
2) The basic puzzle rooms (Missions 13 to 18). You apply what you've learned in a series of self-contained puzzle rooms. This is where the first game really starts to come alive. Notably, there's little interrupting the puzzling--just some periodic VO from Glados as you move around. Each puzzle is a self-contained unit and you do them one after the other.
3) The story level (Mission 19 and the escape sequence). This part has a few interesting features. There's little serious puzzling. The challenges are more of the platform jumping variety, and you mostly just have to find your way from one room to the next by locating the portal-able sections of wall. The whole thing is a sort of proof-of-concept that Portal can work outside of the stark white environments of the "testing rooms," but it's important to focus on how the gameplay here is different from the rest of the game, since this informs the upcoming discussion of Portal 2.
4) Advanced and challenge levels. This is where you go back to the puzzle rooms, 13 to 18, and try to refine your skills. You play both a "hard mode" of each level, and an challenge version where you try to optimize your clear time or number of portals used. This section serves a number of functions:
--It lets you keep trying to improve. There's always room to improve your times on each level by mastering more complicated tricks. Even though level 19 of Portal isn't very hard (the portaling skills you picked up in 13 through 18 are more than enough to get through), the challenges give you place to get better at Portal and be rewarded for it.
--The puzzles were designed with these challenges in mind. When revisiting the puzzle rooms, there are entire alternate solutions to various rooms that, when you find them, essentially make you feel like you're playing new content. In many cases, it's clear that the alternate solutions were intended by the designers (because obtaining the "gold" time on each level requires using them). This not only gives an enormous appreciation for the skill that went into designing them, but gives the player a very rewarding feeling of progress. The first time you saw a puzzle you were just happy to make it to the end, but when you go back to it with more experience at Portal, you see possibilities that completely escaped you the first time, and the "basic" solutions appear primitive.
--It gives replay value. Sort of redundant with the above point, but I want to emphasize that each puzzle is a self-contained unit which you can load up, think about as a whole, and try to plot a better path through. When you're done with the story, you have a way to play more Portal other than simply playing through the story again.
Portal 2
On to Portal 2. When you first start, the most striking difference from its predecessor is the richness of the environment. Portal mostly took place in the aforementioned square white rooms, and most of Portal 2 is spent in much more fully fleshed-out environments. The benefits of this are obvious. There's far more room for an immersive setting for story. And Valve takes full advantage, showing us a much bigger part of the Aperture Science world that we saw in the first game. The writing is tremendously entertaining, the new characters have great voice acting, and the levels are full of little details that just add to experience. Much like the little side rooms in the first game with their "cake is a lie" graffiti that added huge depth to the game world, the environments in Portal 2 go even further and bring Aperture to life.
The gameplay mostly has two modes. The first are "puzzle room" set pieces that are much like the first game (but with more variety in terms of flavor and setting). There are new puzzle pieces to play with (many of which were previewed in videos, but not all). Each new object is introduced with an easy puzzle that basically demonstrates the mechanics. As in the first game, Valve introduces you to each new toy by handing it to you in a carefully-crafted teaching environment, and again they do it extremely well. Even though the game has no manual or explicit tutorial, and has a bunch of new interacting pieces, you'll never be confused about what things do.
Once you've been shown a new object, you have to use it in some increasingly-elaborate puzzles (usually in conjunction with the objects from earlier in the game). These are the meat of the game. And they're a ton of fun to work through the first time--again, this is the payoff of a puzzle game like this: applying what you've learned. To analogize back to the first Portal above, these rooms very nicely fulfill the role of section 2: the main puzzles where you apply your increasing competence at the game. I would say they fill that role well, with only one criticism. Overall, the puzzles feel less freeform than in the first game. Most visibly, there are often a lot less portal-able walls and more "metal" walls, which often makes the path through the puzzle feel a bit more railroaded. It's a subtle complaint, because even in the first game, you were ultimately going to put portals in the "right" places and then move on. But I couldn't escape the distinct feeling that I was being given fewer options and was always being led towards a certain solution. I'd be curious to see if other people felt the same way.
The second main type of gameplay are what I'll call the narrative sequences. You move through the innards of the Aperture facility on a pre-set path, with frequent dialogue and minimal serious puzzling. It's basically a greatly expanded take on part 3 of Portal, but interspersed through the game instead of all being at the end. And it mostly plays out the same way, with the important note that the dialogue and story are much more elaborate than in the first game. Even though I'm focusing mostly on the gameplay here, I want to stress again that Valve really did one-up themselves on the story and immersion aspects, and you'll never resent the parts of the game that are more devoted to exposition. They do try hard to break up the "running down a catwalk" feel of these parts of the game--usually you at least have to portal from one spot to another pretty frequently, and occasionally have to perform a more nontrivial task. But all of these are mostly a tool for increasing immersion that serious obstacles that take a lot of effort to overcome. In the best moments, the silent player character is an active participant in the dialogue by virtue of moving objects around in a way that completes the scene. Ultimately though, these stretches of the game are narrative in function.
So what we have is Portal 1, but with the tutorial, puzzle, and narrative aspects all expanded and interleaved together. A lot of complexity is added to both the story and the gameplay. In short, it's just what we all expected, and brought off extremely well. If you liked Portal, as so many people did, you will have a great time playing through Portal 2.
So what's missing?
I outlined the various parts of the first Portal in the first section to give context to everything I'm saying about Portal 2. In particular, the description of part 4--the difficult puzzles and challenges--was long, as I discussed why it was such an important part of the experience of the first game. So far I've discussed how Portal 2 provides parts 1-3 and improves on them. The big problem with Portal 2 for me, then, is part 4. It's not there at all.
I've played through the Portal 1 story 3 or 4 times in the few years it's been out, taking ~1 hour each time (except the first). In contrast, I've spent many times that number of hours on the "challenge" content, getting better at the game and learning new tricks with portals and cubes. As anyone who's also done this knows, you barely scratch the surface of portaling techniques in the process of merely playing through the story. To me it was like Starcraft: you play the single-player campaign to take in a fun story and learn the basics of how to play, and then you move on to an environment (in this example, the multiplayer game), where you really start exploring the game's potential. Portal would not have been nearly the same for me without the time I spent playing with portals and understanding how to do more with them.
And that's what makes Portal 2 feel, for me, terribly incomplete. They've taken the world of portals, buttons, and cubes, and thrown in laser beams, catapults, various gels, anti-gravity tubes, and more. I want to explore all these things in the same way that I did the first game, and the opportunity's not there. You do a few relatively straightforward puzzles with each one and then the game ends (with a hilarious story along the way). To be clear, playing through the Portal 2 story is a little harder than playing through the Portal 1 story (because there are so many more different bits to worry about). But it's much, much easier than achieving a decent score at the Portal 1 challenge missions. If you spend any appreciable amount of time on those, then Portal 2 will not be very hard for you. That would be fine if it had a follow-up of any kind, but it doesn't.
This isn't a complaint about the length of the game, or about its value and price. It's not about feeling entitled to more game than I got. I give the game a lot more respect than that. It's not like a high school essay assignment--I'm not telling the designers, "you have to give me X hours minimum." I'm saying that, at whatever length, the game should feel like a complete work. It's puzzle game, so it should introduce mechanics and then explore them. To press the point, Portal 1 did this more than satisfactorily, and it was a much shorter game. Portal 2 may have a wonderful story, but as a game--it has a great beginning and then simply cuts off halfway through.
Just to address one final point, I know people are going to say, "but can't you do all those things anyway?". The answer is: not really. Yes, I can go back to each level and try to find better solutions. And I will do exactly that, in fact, but it won't be the same. In Portal, when I went to the challenge menu and selected mission 13, Least Portals, and the gold medal requirement was 4, that was a message from the designer. It was basically a note from him to me saying, "I know you've played through this level already, but if you look harder, there's a way to do it with only 4 portals. See if you can find it." Eventually I did, using a totally new path through the level, and it was as though I was playing new content. Replaying Portal 2 and saying, "let's see if I can do this room again and cut out the extraneous portals" will be kind of fun, but in contrast, it won't be a whole new game. Add to this the fact that there's no supported challenge mode so the only way to play is to replay the story (where all the narrative sequences amount to unstoppable cutscenes)--I'd literally have to make myself a library of save files at each puzzle room. As I've already said, it's not the same.
Conclusion
What Portal 2 does, it does brilliantly. But it is an incomplete experience. It's extremely frustrating how the game introduces so many new toys but gives no avenue to explore their possibilities in a deep way. The few hours I spent playing through the game were thoroughly enjoyable, but all in all expect to spend less time with it than I did with the first Portal, and that's an unexpected disappointment in a game and series with so much potential.
Total Comments 6
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Not enough people played or cared about the challenge modes in Portal 1 so they didn't make release and will be patched in as DLC (this is blindingly obvious), at which point this complaint sort of becomes moot?
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I'd have to agree, I felt the game was incomplete without the challenges there. I especially felt there simply wasn't enough complex puzzles through the normal game, especially ones that involved most or all of the components. The white gel was kind of lame but I'd have loved more puzzles with the red/blue gels and the swirly gravity tube things and lasers. Also the twitch/reaction puzzles weren't really there either, I presume these issues are due to releasing on console as well where theres only so much you can do with an analog stick.
Definitely agree on the comment that everything felt obvious as well. With so few portal surfaces in most rooms it was really obvious the solution to most. The few puzzles that stumped me in game were usually ones where I was simply over-thinking it because I was expecting (hoping) for something more complex and in the end it was something really simple (The very large white gel room was the main culprit and a lot of portal vets seems to be saying similar). I'm sure they will add it as DLC but I'd say that is a bit cynical. I've not played Co-op yet so I won't say I didn't get my value for money, I really did enjoy the single player game narrative a lot and people say co-op is even better so can't wait to try that, but I still think I'll be disappointed with the lack of challenge modes. |
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I'm fine with losing Challenge Mode because it means I get to play the game now instead of in July or August. It's a little unfair to compare 1 to 2 in terms of counting the story mode as exactly half of the content in both cases. Portal 2's story mode is 4x as long as that of Portal 1, and adds co-op mode on top of that. Like Vyk said, it just didn't make development sense for them to delay the game for the sake of challenge modes when they're likely played by a tiny hardcore subset of the playerbase.
I'd recommend you enjoy the co-op content and then put the game away until Challenge mode comes out. Your ultimate experience won't be diminished, just delayed. |
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I agree with you on all counts regarding the single player. That said, don't miss the co-op levels. They're more puzzle-oriented, skipping the narrative sequences entirely in favor of Portal 1-style test chambers with voiceovers. They're also more difficult - adding the second set of portals is at least as interesting a mechanic as any of the newly introduced stuff.
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I have NOT played co-op yet.
Anyway this got me thinking about the exploratory nature of PC games, and in particular how you are more or less expected to solve the puzzle in the same manner. There was a Mac game called Enigmo I used to play in 2002 from a small Indie developer. It was a puzzle game where you basically had to get drops of constantly flowing liquids from point A to B and had various tools or environmental props you could use to that end. The catch was you only had a certain amount of them, and you had to be extremely creative with their application. You almost never solved a puzzle the same way twice. The point of this story is Portal's 'props' feel almost too linear. Seeing the red goop and a ramp generally means "I'm going to have to spill red goop on this particular ramp in order to get from point A to B". Two weighted cubes in the room mean you're going to have to place them on two red triggers. The floaty blue beam and a cube with a trigger on the ceiling means I'm going to have to use the beam to make the cube stick to the trigger. It would be cool to have levels be more interpretive. Maybe this level spits out the blue bouncy goop in one spot, but that may not even be required to solve the puzzle. It's there if you want it. When I played through, too often I found myself overthinking the puzzle, believing there to be some sort of elaborate trigger system required to move on. However, it always ended up being a very linear solution based on the tools at hand. There weren't enough 'portal-able' surfaces overall, so the ones you could use were basically hints by themselves. "Oh, I can use this wall so it probably means I have to in order to move on. I can't use the rest of them." In the end I did very much enjoy the single player, and look forward to trying co-op. |
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I'm interested to hear what you think about co-op when you try it out.
I don't really agree with your gripes, but that's because I'm not really into the challenge modes like you are  |
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