#2 - Portal 2 (360/PS3/PC)
http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/991073-portal-2
Alright, I’ve been thinking. When life gives you lemons, don’t lemonade, make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day if thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon to burn your house down!
Words to live by, to be sure.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original Portal. Maybe it was because the Internet had soured me on it before I finally got around to play it. There wasn’t really any surprise. I heard all the jokes already. It wasn’t a bad game, just not one I felt I needed to go crazy about. I didn’t ‘get’ it. As a result, I didn’t go into Portal 2 with very high expectations.
Portal 2 blew me away.
From start to finish, Portal 2 is a near flawless experience. It’s not a long game - I think I clocked about 6 hours - but for those 6 hours I couldn’t put the game down. The puzzles themselves are well put together and fun to solve. I know a lot of people think that the fact that there are less portal-able surfaces, but I think this allowed each room to have more complexity, which I liked. Portal 2 feels less tutorial-like than the original and they get you into to the beefier puzzles faster. I also appreciated what Valve did to inject a little variety into the gameplay. I think the gels were a great addition, specifically the repulsion and propulsion gels. Conversion was not as good, but it did lead to some pretty tricky brain teasers in the later portion of the game. Environments you visit are varied, rather than the same sterile rooms you were used to in the first game, and the pacing is great.
Portal 2 excels in the character department as well. I’m not the biggest GLaDOS fan in the world, but she’s pretty good here, and less one-note than in the original game. Cave Johnson’s a fun one too, even though he has less relevance than others. The real star of the game, though, is Wheatley. He completely steals the show. I loved this little dude - he’s voice fantastically, he has great writing, he’s funny, everything. Wheatley is without a doubt my favorite new character of the year, and if I were to do another top characters list, I imagine he’d find himself very close to the top.
The game’s even got co-op! I haven’t done too much of this yet, played a bit with HM, but it’s great fun. Being able to place two independent sets of portals makes for some neat gameplay twists and you have to approach the puzzles from a different angle than you do in the single player. It’s a great addition to the series, and doesn’t feel like a tacked-on multiplayer option - obvious care was put into making it as good as the single player experience. You just have to make sure you co-op partner isn’t a dick.
I honestly can’t think of a single thing wrong with Portal 2. It’s as close to what I’d consider a “perfect” game as I’ve played in a long time. It takes all the good concepts from the original game and expands on them tenfold. Everyone owes it to themselves to play this. You can get it on Steam for $15 right now, and it’s worth every penny. I can’t really recommend it enough.
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FF fans don't hang around the internet on a monday morning they are out doing shopping or asleep hungover from parties. They got lives. -The_Djoker