Anthony's Film Review - Portal 2 (Video Game, 2011)

This sequel to an unexpectedly successful video game delivers an awesome experience...

The 2007 video game Portal was a surprise hit. It was a relatively short game designed seemingly as an experiment, and it was first offered as essentially a bonus title in The Orange Box game pack from Valve Software. Who would've thought the small bonus title would be so widely well-received? Well, that's what happened. It must've made the people at Valve realize that they have another software gem in their hands, not just the Half-Life series or the Steam gaming platform. Four years later, the fans got what they wanted: the sequel game, Portal 2. As expected, it's a full-length game, not a short one. And as everyone had hoped, it's a very good one.

Let's recap the basic gameplay of Portal. In this first-person puzzle game, you hold a gun that can open blue portals and orange portals in light gray and white surfaces. Anything that goes through a blue portal comes out the orange one, and vice versa. You can only have one blue portal and one orange portal open at a time. Also, there are bluish force fields that block shots from the portal gun, and passing through those fields makes existing portals disappear. This is a game where you use a combination of portals and other objects in the environment to maneuver obstacles and reach an exit. Those other objects include buttons that activate other mechanisms and weighted cubes that press and hold those buttons.

The preceding description applies to the first Portal game and this sequel. What makes Portal 2 so much more fun are the new puzzle objects to interact with. You will come across laser beams, receptacles that receive laser light to trigger other mechanisms, and weighted prism cubes to redirect laser light. Another cool thing: a blue force field tube that carries anything in a forward direction, plus mechanisms to reverse its direction (indicated by a color change from blue to orange). An even cooler thing: platforms of light that are solid like matter. And you know what's neat with these last two cool things? You can have them pass through the portals you open, allowing you to extend them and give you a helping hand.

But that's not all. Portal 2 also introduces three liquid gels with different unique properties. The blue Repulsion Gel is a bouncy substance, such that you can use a floor covered with the blue stuff as a trampoline. The orange Propulsion Gel enables you to run really fast along a surface covered in it. And the white Conversion Gel coats dark surfaces that normally would not allow portals to be made, turning them into white surfaces that can hold portals. Sounds really cool, doesn't it? So just imagine these gels and the other test chamber items in combination. How fun would it be to solve the puzzles?

All of this occurs in the context of a story. You play the same character from the first Portal game. The setting, Aperture Laboratories, is also the same, except that it's many, many years after the events of the first game. You maneuver your way through Aperture test chambers and other parts of the massive facility, though parts of it are old and decayed. You're not alone, however. As the story begins, you are accompanied by a robotic eyeball named Wheatley, voiced by British comedian Stephen Merchant. He is an interesting character, one who sounds friendly and pleasant at first. Interestingly, another side of this character comes out, but even so, Wheatley is a character in this game you will just love.

But guess who is back? GLaDOS! The evil supercomputer, voiced once again by Ellen McLain, is reawakened early in Portal 2. As before, there is a tingling sense of trouble as GLaDOS oversees you navigating Aperture's test chambers. But something very interesting happens. Due to unexpected circumstances, GLaDOS becomes an ally to the player. Suddenly, another side of the character is explored. Give it time and you may be surprised to know whose side GLaDOS is on. Also, if you observe carefully, you will get to know who the programmed personality of GLaDOS was based on.

And that leads me to described the third major character in Portal 2: Cave Johnson, the founder and CEO of Aperture Science. Yeah, that was an older name for the company. It was called Aperture Science Innovators in the 1950s, before becoming simply Aperture sometime later. Anyway, you don't see Cave Johnson. Rather, you hear old audio recordings of the man as you navigate through and explore the oldest and forgotten parts of Aperture. Cave Johnson is voiced by J.K. Simmons (yes, the same actor who played J. Jonah Jameson in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movie trilogy), and he is flat-out hilarious! If you thought GLaDOS could make you laugh, wait until you get a load of the things this gruff, overly proud executive says to his test subjects and staff at Aperture.

Overall, what you have here is a video game package that is beautifully put together. You have an exciting and mentally stimulating puzzle game, a nice story, a cast of delightful characters. It's an engrossing ride from start to finish, filled with great fun and also plenty of laughs along the way. If you really love the puzzles of this game, be sure to check out any version of Portal 2 that lets players create their own puzzles and share them with other players around the world, because there are tons of fantastic community-created test chambers to play, and they will surely keep you delighted for hours on end. But even if you just stick with what the developers at Valve created, you will still be immersed in Portal 2. This is no doubt an excellent video game, and it's definitely one of my all-time favorites.

Anthony's Rating:

For more information about Portal 2, visit the Internet Movie Database and Moby Games.

In addition, check out my review of Portal.