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Portal 2
PC (Steam)
A Better Sequel to an Already Great Game
5/5 stars
Portal 2 expands from the original in several great ways making it the best puzzle game to come out in a long time.
Portal 2 is based on a simple concept. You obtain a gun that can shoot 2 different portals. One is blue, the other is orange. You can't shoot a portal on just any surface, it pretty much has to be a white wall. Once you've shot both portals, you can walk in one and out the other. That's pretty much it and it's that simple concept which makes this game so great.
Puzzles can include a variety of obstacles. There's the very often used button switch where you can either stand on it or place a block on it to activate. There are lasers where you must redirect them to new activation nodes or you must block them. There are catapults which launch you from one end of a room to another. There are light bridges you can extend through portals and a few types of goo which make you bounce, run fast, or allow you to put portals on. None of these obstacles require intense, fast hand-eye coordination moves to pass so any average gamer can play this through to the end and enjoy it.
The story is top notch. You don't have to have played the first game to understand what's going on , but it would certainly enhance the experience. I won't spoil you with details, but the basic plot is that you're in an experimental laboratory and you need to escape. The voice acting doesn't get any better, and the story keeps you laughing along the way.
Not only that, but there's a completely different story and completely different puzzles for the single player and co-op modes. It would be better to play the single player first, but it's not a requirement. I played the co-op first and it went great.
Graphically the game is sound. There isn't anything absolutely amazing about it but it's not really bland either. There's enough variety in the environments you interact with to keep things interesting visually.
My PS3 copy allowed me to connect to my Steam account and it gave me a free PC copy of the game as well. With this you can play with your Steam friends and it doesn't matter whether they're on their PS3 or PC. That's a nice bonus I wish other games would do.
This website has the genre of this game as an action first person shooter. While this may technically be true, I consider it a puzzle game that just happens to be in a first person perspective. You don't need to be good at controlling a character in the first person to tackle this game, but you do need to enjoy solving puzzles or you might get annoyed or frustrated.
While it's only downfall is that there isn't much incentive to go through either story mode again since you'll be solving puzzles you've already seen, the DLC allows you to encounter new and unique puzzles.
Portal 2 is a great sequel and I recommend you play both this and the first version.
5/5.
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