It’s here, so incredibly early in the game, that I began to wonder if the ageing Source engine was finally reaching the end of its lifespan.
Portal 2 follows on from the inserted ending of Portal where Chell was shown to have been dragged back inside the laboratories, waking in the most unusual of surroundings with an automated voice encouraging her to get up and move around the room to see if her induced sleep has left her brain damaged. It was purely through GLaDOS and the discovery of the Rat Man’s chambers (recently explained in the pre-Portal 2 comic, Lab Rat) that players were able to piece together this wonderfully bizarre puzzle.
Much like Valve’s Half Life series, the game’s protagonist is entirely mute and all dialogue is simply one way, something that Portal was highly celebrated for with its narration occurring without any actual narration. Her sense of humour is completely twisted, making transparent promises of a reward for all your efforts and it was through her that the first game was able to charm its way into our hearts along with our minds. construct named GLaDOS that eventually decides to kill you, having learned everything it could from your performances in the tests. Traversing the portals is, at first, as simple as just stepping through but, in time, further complicated by having to factor in momentum gained from leaping from great heights in order to fling yourself with enough velocity to reach your intended destination.Īperture Science, the testing facility, is ran by an insane A.I.
Each test chamber is a puzzle of sorts, sometimes requiring you to activate switches in order to leave the chamber and other times simply challenging you to just reach the almost implausibly located exit.
Stephen merchant portal 2 series#
Chell awakes only to be herded along a series of test chambers, acquiring a Portal Device along the way – a piece of technology which allows for two windows to be created that bridge space and time. You play as Chell, a test subject of Aperture Science which is implied to be about as voluntary as the hamster with a 9V battery wired into its brain. Those who wish to keep the events of the first Portal a mystery should return to this review at a later date and direct your browser here in the mean time.įor the curious and completely un-initiated, Portal is a FPPPGWP (First Person Platformer Puzzle Game with Portals – yes, I just made that up). Portal 2 does not disappoint.ĭisclaimer: Avoiding spoiling the events of the first game is sadly unavoidable although I promise with crossed eyes and needles in my heart to not reveal the story of Portal 2. Bringing with it a closing to one of the best marketing campaigns seen, heard and experienced in recent times, the wait is now finally over and my dreams have become a reality. Knowing that some of the greatest, most creative minds in the industry have long been at work on the follow up to the sleeper agent of The Orange Box, I never once doubted that Portal 2 would be anything less than legendary. The anticipation for Portal 2 has been like no other. These punishingly long years preceding Portal 2’s release last week have at least been filled with those spontaneous bursts of desire to return to Portal, with the experience never failing to put anything short of a great big silly grin across my face. Ignoring Portal until I had played through Episode Two was a mistake I feel I share with millions, sidelining one of the single greatest video game experiences that I never saw coming. I’d been waiting just over a year to follow on from Episode One and no amount of hype or clever marketing was ever going to have me playing one of the other included titles first. When my copy of The Orange Box unlocked on Steam a little less than four years ago, I couldn’t have been any more excited to sit and play the next chapter of the Half Life 2 story.
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