There are many games which I love more than if they were a flying monkey which I had just adopted and gone off on a romantic holiday to Paris with. Incidentally many of these games have been made by Valve, The Half Life series, Team Fortress 2, however, the original Portal is lacking off this list more than a Tortoise is lacking from a Taiwanese brothel.
That’s not to say it wasn’t a bad game though, in fact it was a great game. The Call of Duty series (Barring Cod 4 and 1) couldn’t think to have been as good as this game if they had the knowledge of Stephen Hawking helping them. It was funny, with a dark sense of humour throughout and some of the levels were more innovative than some guy who invents a flame thrower which fits on the end of your dick. However, it was nowhere near as good as people said; as they made it sound like Jesus had come back down to Earth with enough Alcohol for a lifetimes supply for everybody and a Golden Giraffe. Many of the levels are more repetitive than me repeating that they are repetitive, and most are easy (except chamber 18, I have nightmares about that) including the boss fight against GLaDoS, which was easier than picking up a prostitute in Las Vegas. It could also probably be completed in an hour and a half, and that's considering you probably took your dog for a walk, and went onto the internet to rave about it in-between. Call of Duty has a longer single player for Christ sake (that said, most of that was buildings exploding and guys shouting fuck at the site of Vietnamese.)
Portal 2 however, has become one of my favourite games of the year, or the decade. Forgetting the fact that it’s been a short decade, and the only other new game so far was Shogun 2, however that doesn’t mean that this is a bad game.
I am possibly the only person who thinks this game is better than the original for many reasons, the main being the puzzles are a lot smarter in my eyes, and it has a better story, however there is also another reason. It can finally shut up the cunts who go on about cakes and Companion Cubes like he’s just seen a snowman firing a rocket launcher. I was one of the few people who didn’t find the constant jokes about them funny, but then again, I’m not an idiot. So thank you Valve, thank you.
Now the story, which it has this time around, instead of just doing a load of pointless puzzles for the fore-mentioned cake. Now Valve has waved their magic story wand, or should that be crowbar, and you now have more of an idea on why you are doing this sort of thing. It’s all about you having to replace Glados (I still refuse to type it out like I’ve fallen asleep on the shift key, occasionally rolling off it) before doing the same again... ok comparing it to the Half Life story is like comparing a blow job off a stripper to instead using a Hoover on it.
And now like a schizophrenic playing a puzzle game, I have changed my view from liking the story to thinking it can at times be more of an annoying distraction than a squeaky toy being shoved up somebody’s arse upstairs. So here are some more criticisms of it, between the great puzzle sections, you walk along more metal railings in a dark warehouse than a cleaner in the Saw films. It’s as if it’s trying to shove it’s scenery in your face like a boar goring a man. There's an extended sequence where you fall down a hole for Christ sake, how about you add a level where you just wave at s very far away man for 5 hours next time.
The puzzles are I think a lot better than last time, if not still a bit easy. There's a new tutorial every 5 seconds to show you a new gadget as if it’s now appealing to console retards (wonder why...), and these are usually just as they are getting challenging. The “tutorial” puzzles treat you so much like a retard, by the end of them you feel like having somebody fart in your ear canal (or listening to the song Friday by Rebecca Black.) When you can’t figure out a puzzle, thinking the develepors are bastards, putting the exit just out of reach, it makes you feel like Albert Einstein on crack when you finally figure it out. However that is not where the best puzzles are found, as they are in the unexplored seas of co-op.
So I got one of my about 5 friends to play through these with me, and they are great. The puzzles are a lot more challenging, and figuring one out with a friend seems to be as big of an accomplishment as climbing Everest to shoot down a nuke. The puzzles are complicated, and this isn’t helped by having to control a friend, but it is fun, well for the first time you complete it.
The game is about a re-playable as trying to kill the same person more than once. The second time you play them, the puzzles don’t feel as good figuring them out, as if you’ve looked down and realised the person tossing you off is in fact a man. And trying to play through the co-op with a different friend frustrates you due to their idiocy, and then due to you seemingly being a genius. This may change however with the free DLC (yeah console cunts, that's nothing new for Valve and it should be called a patch) of new maps to try again. (Oh and hats... yeah there about as useful as a car with the engine replaced with a potato.)
The humour is just as good as the last game, with Stephen Merchant being funnier than arguing with an idiot who’s being repeatedly kicked in the balls. However, even his genius is nowhere near as good as that of J.K. Simmons, who plays Cave Johnson, the head of Aperture, detailing its downfall. Glados herself is nowhere near as funny as the first game herself, more just reusing the same You killed me wah wah jokes.
I seem to have put in way to many criticisms here for a game that I consider the best of the year so far, and that’s because I expect so much of Valve. The Half Life series is my favourite gaming series of all time, and even though I didn’t like Portal as much as everyone else, it was still good. This game is worth buying, and anybody who doesn’t is more of an idiot than the man who uses nuclear power in his car. Just don’t expect any re-playability until Valve start updating it as regularly as Team Fortress 2.
AND NO MORE CAKES.
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