If you are familiar with making orange holes in the ceiling and dropping boxes on top of robots who aren`t that offended by it, then you know Portal.
Critically acclaimed and loved by many, the first game of the series managed to give the Orange Box the fame it deserves(not saying the other games weren`t fine in their own right). Awarded “Game of the year” by a whole bunch of magazines, the game itself looks more like a tech demo, like a pre-alpha of any other shooter. You control Chell, a female test subject of a rogue artificial intelligence system, GLaDOS, test subject who has to escape from the laboratory by making smart use of the portal gun. All fine and well, until you find that the challenges are deadly, and why not, deadly hard.
I mean, Portal is a game in which you actually get to use your intelligence for mastering the pretty diverse challenges that arise from GLaDOS`s desire to be entertained(and to test the portal gun, of course). Making smart use of physics is daily routine as you are trying to escape the “Aperture” laboratories. This empowers the gameplay to be revolutionary, mind bending, crazy. You have to twist your head around many things in your lifetime, but learning physics, forgetting what you learnt and applying the first is pretty entertaining, and allows for some replayability.
The story of Portal 2 will kick off some time after the first game, at the end of which you “put GLaDOS to sleep”. You wake up in a nature-filled, decaying Aperture laboratory, in which you awake the AI once again. She doesn`t like the fact that you disabled her in the first game, and will put you up for more tests. “For science, you monster.”
The graphics engine used in all Valve FPS, called Source, will be improved and brought up to standards, with an increase in the light dynamics (there is finally some degree of darkness in the game), everything looks much better, more metallic, more real, which adds to the general atmosphere that the game will immerse the user into.
Sound is state-of-the-art, sentinels will be even more funnier than before, the heartbreaking lines will still be there, along with the cute voices. These voices sound exactly what they should sound like in a plastic dystopia and fit in perfectly with the theme.
Save the best for last, they say. Portal 2 will provide the players with a co-op mode, which can be accessed via the internet, regardless of platform they are playing on. The co-op and the single player campaign have been separated and, of course, the difficulty level will vary greatly between these two. If the single player one will be challenging, the co-op mode will include some really really nasty and hard puzzles, often testing the reflexes of the players, ensuring nerd-screaming after each successful completion of a test chamber. There is still testing to be done, I would really like to see how the game will be affected by lag and other technical issues, as many of the puzzles are to be synchronised to the milisecond. Each portal gun has a different colour scheme, just to differentiate them from each other, although you can use your teammate`s portals at will.
New objects will be introduced in the game, along with a reappearance of the heart-decorated box. Certain cubes will be able to redirect beams at the sentinels, other surfaces have the trampoline effect, bouncing back anything thrown at them. This will ensure a more increased degree of replayability than in case of Portal, and will add another dimension to the incredibly interesting but un-immersive world of the Aperture Laboratories.
So, will I buy the game on the 21th of April, the european retail release date of April ? I will surely do. Valve never disappointed me to the point that I will no longer buy their games. Now, with Portal 2, they promise us not only an upgrade from Portal, but a incredible, longer, harder to master experience, of which I am certain that it will satisfy even the more pretentious in our ranks.
Preview mark ? 9 out of 10. Would have been 10 if I were a shooter kind of guy.
