Portal 2 Review

Portal 2 is a game on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 which is a first-person shooter with an innovative twist. I played the PC version. It's a puzzle game where the guns don't kill people (there are no people to kill!), instead they shoot two portals, where you walk through one and come out the other. The entire game's 8-10 hour long adventure are based around these puzzle elements and Portal 2 is constantly throwing new ideas at you, be it redirecting lasers, blue gel that sticks to the floor and makes you bounce off it and an alien-like beam that picks you up towards the base. All these gameplay mechanics mold together well and merge into a great, fun gameplay experience while it lasts.

The game also has a really good story about you, a test subject, in a massive science facility trying to escape with a blue robot called Wheatley. All the while an evil AI woman (called GLADoS) is trying to kill you. It's a gripping tale and the story is always taking unexpected twists of which is thrilling for the player. The gameplay doesn't get stale however some of the puzzles were so difficult I found them infuriating, so I had no shame looking up an online walkthrough every now and again.

There's even a choice between online or local co-op for two players where you play as two robots (Atlas and P-Body) built by GLADoS taking the place of human test subjects as its own seperate story/ campaign mode. Meaning combined with the Steam Workshop where anyone can create their own test chambers with a relatively easy to use editor, there's a lot of content in this game!

Unfortunately, once you've finished both campaigns there's not much replay- value left inside, apart from the Community Test Chambers in the Steam Workshop as mentioned before. Unfortunately 95% of them are terrible and goes to show that nobody makes levels quite as good as the developers do. Also, there are microtransactions in this game in the form of virtual hats you can buy with real money. This is something I am strongly against and considering this is a full retail game pricing and retailing at around £15 on Steam, Valve shouldn't stoop as low as the free-to-play developers on Apple's App Store with their free games cluttered with microtransactions.  

Overall this game gets 7.5/10.