Portal 2

The sequel to the hugely popular, physics bending, 'Portal' is finally here... and GLaDOS is still alive...

Having been in stasis for hundreds of years, Chell is woken by one of GLaDOS's personality cores, which, inadvertently, awakens GLaDOS! Finding herself captive at the badly decayed Aperture Science Labs, she must escape the clutches of homicidal A.I. Robot GLaDOS utilising the legendary ASHPD (Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device) 'Portal Gun'. Whilst GLaDOS is determined to repair the facility and restart its deadly experiments, Chell must do all she can, alongside unlikely new allies, to escape.

With both a single player mode, where you play as Chell, and multiplayer mode, where you play as one of 2 robots; Atlas or P-Body, Portal 2 uses innovative gameplay and storylines, creates a cast of dynamic characters plus a has host of brand new puzzles for you to solve using the Portal Gun.

Break the Laws of Spatial Physics in ways you never thought possible - use your wits rather than masses of weaponry in this 'funhouse of diabolical science'!

• Dave Wallace January 09, 2013 PS3

  ****

  Portal 2 might just be the best game I've ever played.
  
  A puzzle game at heart, the title also mixes platformer elements with a science-fiction setting, a large dose of humour, and even some occasional touches of high-octane first-person-shooter action, to create an incredibly addictive, challenging, funny, maddening, but ultimately hugely rewarding experience that's like nothing else I've ever seen on a console.
  
  Making use of a deceptively simple gameplay mechanism - the ability to use a futuristic portal-gun on certain surfaces to create two separate portals, which you can then travel between by stepping through one of them - the game invites you to try and solve a succession of increasingly tricky puzzles in which you're trapped in a room, and a variety of buttons must be pressed or vast chasms leapt over before you can get to the exit. You're essentially treated like a human lab-rat - albeit one that can operate some fairly sophisticated machinery. But rather than try to dress up your tasks with an elaborate story or an exotic location, the game instead puts its cards on the table and candidly chooses to make the protagonist of the game nothing more than a lone, anonymous human being, trapped in a gigantic machine-complex that's controlled by an evil artificial-intelligence doing its best to defeat you.
  
  As well as being a clever postmodern comment on the nature of computer games (after all, whenever we sit down to play a game, don't we all become lone humans trying to beat an enemy computer?) this minimalist plot sets up a great conflict between your character - a girl called Chell, about whom very little is known - and GLaDOS, a villainous robot-computer with a disturbing synthesised female voice who constantly mocks you and your attempts to escape from her "tests".
  
  Whilst this all might sound a little too thin a concept to base an entire game around, the game gradually adds all sorts of details and complications that help to keep things feeling fresh throughout. In fact, the learning curve of the game is one of its best features, giving you just enough information to help you find your feet, but never treating you in such a patronising way that you get bored and want to skip ahead. At first, the puzzles are based around fairly simple challenges: for example, using your portal gun to access an otherwise unreachable area to retrieve a block that must be placed on a button in order to open the exit door. But things quickly progress to more complicated setups - like jumping from a high ledge into a portal on the floor in order to generate momentum to hurl you out of a vertical portal on the wall and over a chasm that's too wide to jump over.
  
  And once you've just-about mastered these basic mechanics, the game starts to introduce new complications, like lasers, "light bridges" (beams of solid light that you can walk across - and which can themselves travel through portals, allowing you to create bridges in other areas of the levels), armed sentry droids, springs, special gels that help you run faster or bounce higher, and tractor beams (glowing tubes that you can travel within, and which you can use to retrieve objects) - all of which enable the creation of some hugely complex levels that require quite a bit of head-scratching to figure out. Indeed, you'll likely get stuck several times whilst playing Portal 2, convinced that there's no logical way to get out of a particular test chamber. But sooner or later, through a bit of experimentation and lateral thinking, the solution will always present itself, giving you a real feeling of triumph as you continue on to the next challenge.
  
  But the core mechanics of the game, whilst very enjoyable and highly-polished, aren't the only thing that make Portal 2 such fun to play. The design of the game is also beautiful, combining a sleek, minimalist look (GLaDOS herself looks like an evil ipod come to life) with a subtle sense of degradation and decay as the facility falls apart, as well as adding some slightly more unexpected details. The look and feel of the game undergo some particularly interesting changes once you get to the section in which you explore the underground test chambers from the 1950s-80s, all of which have their own distinct ambience, as well as coming with their own sets of unique challenges.
  
  However, even then, there's something else that elevates this game above being very good, even above being great, to being nigh-on perfect. And that thing is Portal 2's sense of humour.
  
  Now, a lot of games try to be funny, and sometimes they even succeed. But I've never encountered a game that's as consistently funny as Portal 2, and which uses so many different styles of humour to entertain the player, as well as to add greater depth to its story.
  
  GLaDOS herself is one of the funniest character in the game, constantly zinging you with dark, deadpan cracks about how ugly and fat you are, how your parents never loved you and how she hopes her tests will kill you. The evil AI will also tease you by pretending to give you information about your forgotten history, as well as subtle indicators as to the origins of the Aperture Laboratories testing centre - some of which is reliable, and some of which isn't. But the dark humour of GLaDOS is undercut by broader, sillier humour that comes with each appearance of Wheatley, a hilariously inept yet well-meaning (well, mostly) spherical robot who does his best to guide you through the game's early levels, but who often causes as many problems as he solves.
  
  Along with this character-based comedy, there are all sorts of humourous asides that also serve to set up subplots in service of Portal 2's larger story. For example, your journey into the bowels of the facility unearths 1950s recordings of the founder of Aperture, Cave Johnson, which give some tantalising hints as to the origins of GLaDOS as well as the development of Aperture's scientific experiments. And frequent references to the portal-conducting properties of moondust are developed halfway through the game when you encounter a moondust-gel that allows you to coat walls and floors with a substance that gives you the ability to generate portals in previously-unreachable places - with even more of a payoff for this idea coming in the game's final twist, which provides you with a hilarious yet perfectly logical way of defeating your nemesis once and for all. Despite this being a sequel to the original Portal (a short game that was itself a spin-off from Valve's highly successful Half-Life series), there's still very much a sense that this game is a complete and self-contained story in itself, and even though I never played the first game I had no trouble following all of the developments here.
  
  One final paragraph of praise has to be reserved for the game's voice-over work, which is some of the best I've ever encountered, despite being limited to such a small cast. Stephen Merchant (perhaps best known for his frequent collaborations with Ricky Gervais) is an inspired choice for Wheatley, with an endearing Bristolian burr that takes on a more sinister - yet still somehow silly - quality as the game's plot progresses. J.K. Simmons (who you might recognise as J. Jonah Jameson from the Spider-Man movies) is wonderful as the brash and larger-than-life voice of Cave Johnson, with one particular rant about lemons that will leave you crying with laughter. But the crowning glory has to go to Ellen McLain for her performance as GLaDOS, managing to be utterly sinister yet still leaving the door very slightly ajar for a hope of redemption, especially towards the end of the game. And the verbal conflicts between GLaDOS and Wheatley are funny and dramatic in equal measure, especially during the later sections of the game where the balance of power between the two characters shifts considerably.
  
  I bought this game a few weeks ago, and even with a few other new titles competing for my attention in the wake of Christmas, it's this game that I've come back to time and time again - which should give you a good idea of just how addictive and enjoyable it is. And I haven't even touched on the game's co-operative two-player mode, in which you control two robotic test-subjects called Atlas and P-body, and in which puzzles must be solved by working cooperatively (and if you thought that solving puzzles involving two portals was difficult, just wait until you try solving ones that involve four).
  
  In short, this is a game which is packed to the gills with innovative and original ideas, clever and rewarding challenges, great acting performances and an intelligent and subtle plot - and I guarantee that once you start playing it, you won't be able to stop until it's finished. And even then, you'll wish it could go on forever.

• Yuji Lloyd September 27, 2011 360

  ****

  If you had asked me a few years ago, prior to the release of 2007's Portal, what I thought about buying a game in which you essentially have to solve a series of puzzles using nothing but a teleportation gun, I probably would have laughed the suggestion off, as would almost everyone I know.
  
  Fast forward four years, and I cannot stress enough how much I recommend both Portal and this year's sequel, Portal 2. Somehow, Portal 2 has managed to do what most would have thought impossible, outperforming its own original, receiving scores of A+, 95%, and 9 or even 10 out of 10, across the board - everyone loves it.
  
  The game is quite possibly one of the most fun games that I have ever had, and certainly one of the best at keeping me concentrating on it from start right through to finish. You have to really think outside the box on a number of levels, especially as the game progresses, in order to succeed, and that idea of challenging yourself is something that most computer games tend not to do, making the gameplay more straightforward.
  
  But not Portal 2. You really do have to engage your brain whilst playing it, and I think that's one of the many reasons that game reviewers have responded so positively to it, and why it has sold literally millions of copies in the past six months alone. Selling units in the millions is a feat not accomplished by many video games, but it is very easy to see why Portal 2 has managed it with seeming ease this year, for it is such a terrific game; there really is nothing else like it on the market at the moment.
  
  And not only is the gameplay fantastic, but the music featured in the game is brilliant too. After the success they found with American songwriter John Coulton's Still Alive in the first Portal game, the makers decided to recruit Coulton to write another song exclusively for the game. Coulton then played through the game himself to get a feel for it, and then wrote the incredible, 'Want You Gone', which plays through the end credits and is truly inspired by the excellence of the game itself. And in tandem with Coulton, the developers, Valve, asked the American indie-rock band, The National, to write a song for the game too and they contributed music in the form of a new song, Exile Vilify, which is every bit as brilliant and fitting to the game as Coulton's stunning Want You Gone.
  
  The rest of the game's exceptional music was composed by Mike Morasky, who had worked on the original's soundtrack as well as such games as the recent Left 4 Dead series and Team Fortress 2, and he has come up with yet another terrific soundtrack that perfectly fits the game, keeping you enthralled and absorbed by both the visuals and the sounds from the moment you pick up your control.
  
  There is not a bad word that I could possibly think of to hold against Portal 2, and I can only stress again how much I enjoy playing such a brilliantly thought-out game. It goes beyond almost all the other games on the market in terms of enjoyment, originality, and ingenuity, and purchasing it is an absolutely solid investment that will bring you hours and hours of great gameplay that few other games can match.

• Theo Livingston June 08, 2011 360

  ****

  The sequel to one of the most original puzzle games of all-time is here and it certainly delivers. Portal 2 is a first-person puzzle game in which you create linked portals to travel through to complete previously impossible challenges and find your way through the test chambers. The vast majority of the game takes place in aforementioned test chambers with an exit elevator at the end of each one. There is also a bucketload of new features which vary from puzzle features to characters such as Stephen Merchant who voices Wheatley, your robot companion. Portal 2 also has a brand new cooperative mode which can be played online over Xbox Live or on split screen with a friend. A common problem is that finding a random player online that doesn't just mess around however when you find someone who plays it properly the experience is truly amazing. Overall Portal 2 is a worthy successor to the revolutionary puzzle game that blew the world away. This game is an absolute must-buy.

• Portal 2: Intro 360PS3 | 01:14 Play Trailer
• Portal 2: Pre-order Ad 360PS3 | 00:30 Play Trailer