Just finished playing this game last night and I gotta say WOW! :eek::eek::eek: Holy crap, what an amazing game! This game has everything I wanted: great story, memorable characters, unique gameplay, hard but not too hard (had to look up 3 solutions), pacing, and false endings…it just blew me away!
I had read a little bit of the reviews before I started. Nothing with spoilers, but I heard some common complaints: not as good as the first one, too short, not as groudbreaking. Fuck that, those people must have accidently played a different game or something because I have no idea how anyone who likes video games and FPS type games and puzzlers could not be utterly amazed by it!
It’s at least 2-3 times as long as the first one. I never felt length was a factor at all. The story’s pace was perfect and things happened when they logically would have, given what was going on in the story. There was a few twists that added many hours to the game and gave you a background in the facility. Whereas in the first game, you are kind of in the dark about the whole facility and GLaDOS’s role, in Portal 2 you find out everything you wanted to know and more. My favorite part of the game was going through the entire history of the compound and how it came to be
The gameplay is superb, and that’s without having even gotten into the co-op mode. It’s not just 2 portals and some tricky slingshotting anymore, but they were able to combine an ass-load of physics tricks into the game. And just when you think they’ve run out of tricks, you get some more.
Speaking of the tricks, while you were able to get a lot of game out of a couple of portals and gravity, you will be using them in new ways and areas that you could only have imagined in the first game. As I said, I LOVED the romp through the history of the facility. Valve really knows how to craft a believable, if fantastic world. At no time was I taken out of it by poor design. Maybe that’s just me, but the enormity of the facility doesn’t overwhelm but absorbs you into the game. Many times I found myself simply staring into the deep or looking above just to get a scope of how big the place is. Of course such a thing would be impractical and impossible in the real world, but that’s why it’s a game
The only thing I wished there was, and I’ve noticed this in many FPS games, is a lack of secrets. Maybe there are some on the 2nd playthrough, but I would have liked secret doors or something, side quests that tell you more about the background and history of the game world, stuff like that. Unlockables are simply not the same thing. But that’s a small complaint of such a great game. The voice acting was spot on, the dialogue was snappy and smart, and the characters were believable and fleshed out (despite having no flesh). If you like puzzlers and FPS, you owe it to yourself to buy this game! And it’s only $30 on the PC (think it’s more on the consoles) so you have no excuses not to buy it! Do it! Now! Go now, stop reading and buy it!
BTW, however, and I’ve complained about this before with Starcraft 2, I HATE HATE HATE the forced online registration part. People with slow connections are destined to be the 2nd class citizens of the 21st century! Took me hours to update before I could even play it, then when my connection crashed I was forced to wait for it to connect again. God damn it, I don’t want to play online, just run the damn thing off the hard drive!!! :mad:
