Already acclaimed as a potential game of the year, can a non-violent first-person shooter comedy like Portal 2 win over hardened audiences?
By Leo Stiles
About half way through Portal 2, I finally realised that the entire game was a comedy. This occurs when the story’s main antagonist that I had been battling through over five huge levels was reduced to a potato. Yes, a potato.
My first reaction was to laugh, as I had been doing this with increasing regularity throughout the first few hours of gameplay; my second was the realisation that the developer, Valve, has finally pulled off the world’s first successful non-violent first-person shooter comedy.
The original Portal was just one element of Valve’s generous 2008 release The Orange Box, a collection of the Half Life series for consoles, along with Team Fortress 2 and the oddity that was this strange little game where you were given a gun, but nothing to shoot.
Looking back now, it is hard to recall the other games in the package, despite their obvious brilliance. Portal was the one that captured your imagination and offered you a world where, for once, the ability to shoot people in the face wasn’t the main focus of the game.
As all great games are, Portal had a breathtakingly simple concept: you have a gun that can shoot portals onto specific surfaces in order to navigate some fiendishly designed environments. This was complicated in a number of ways by including switches, force fields and gun turrets that made for some devilish puzzles where only three dimensional thinking would see you make progress.
Nope, nothing complicated about this screenshot whatsoever…
Portal 2 is all this on a grander scale and rather than the excess of say Gears of War, where the continuing template for sequels is “bigger, better and more badass”. Valve’s sequel is the first game taken to its obvious conclusion with gargantuan levels rendering the whole game as the equivalent of the most colossal amusement park funhouse you have ever seen.
Just like the first game, things start off pretty tame with most rooms solveable by a carefully placed portal here or a switched triggered there; but before long you are using gravity to fling yourself about the levels like a human pinball.
Later levels add in cool stuff like lasers, a variety of gels that once painted onto the right areas bounce you from surface to service or rocket you about the place like Speedy Gonzales. Some of the leaps of faiths required by these gels are truly breathtaking and all the while you are being pushed to think more and creatively at every turn.
Every so often you will get stuck but the game is savvy enough to make sure you never stay stuck for too long with some solutions, when discovered, having you kick yourself with their eventual obviousness. Whatever about the other elements of Portal 2, the excellence of the level design is peerless and should make some games (ahem, Call of Duty, ahem) ashamed of their simplistic reliance on simple corridor design.
Taken on their own, these levels could prove a little bit detached and clinical but the masterstroke of the game is its excellent comedy narrative.
Right at the centre of the story is the psychotic computer GLaDOS, who controls the entire environment of the scientific testing facility that you find yourself in, Aperture Laboratories. The original game featured the computer as the main antagonist too and the pleasure of that game was hearing her go from a benign disembodied voice to a detached and homicidal robot.
Well, she’s back and rather pissed off with you and whilst putting you through another gauntlet of deadly testing rooms she provides some of the best put-downs I’ve ever heard, with a number of references to the player as being mentally challenged and a slew of comprehensive slights such as this one:
“Remember before when I was talking about smelly garbage standing around being useless? That was a metaphor. I was actually talking about you. And I’m sorry. You didn’t react at the time so I was worried it sailed right over your head. That’s why I had to call you garbage a second time just now.”
Voice artistry
The voice acting is superb with GLaDOS, once again voiced by Ellen McLain, and new additions to the cast comprising of Stephen Merchant as Wheatly, your new robot sidekick and the ever excellent J.K. Simmons as the founder of Aperture Labs. The comic interplay between these three is fantastic and even when working hard to stay alive in the various death traps, not a moment goes by when a couple of lines from one of the characters results in a big laugh.
The main campaign is suitably large this time which should take you around six to ten hours to complete depending on your tolerance for inter-spatial level design but for those that breeze through the game there is a whole second campaign for co-operative play with a friend that is the very nearly the equal of the main game.
In this mode the puzzles are even more devious and require a great deal of focused co-operation to succeed. Comedy plays a part here with the voice of GLaDOS playing you off against your friend and alternately insulting your performance. Even without this there are plenty of comedy deaths to be had as you unwittingly send your partner to their doom with a misplaced portal.
Anyone looking for some competitive multiplayer is going to be disappointed and I’m glad that Valve resisted the current trend of shoehorning this sort of mode into a game that doesn’t need it. That said, upcoming DLC should provide some challenge rooms with which to win bragging rights.
What you have with Portal 2 is not just a contender for game of the year but a piece of entertainment that just isn’t possible in any other medium. Not only does it offer a richly realised world and first class gameplay, it also has some of the most finely honed comedy this side of Arrested Development.
Best of all, it’s wrapped up in a package that offers the kind of value for money that is the exception, rather than the rule, in modern videogames. A masterpiece.
Format: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Windows, Mac; Developer: Valve Corporation
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