Portal 2 - Page 25

I dearly hope that's not the case

I finished the game a week ago and in hindsight it might actually not be that good. I played through the entire game in 3 sittings with very short breaks in between and I found the puzzles to be way too easy - they were too obvious.

Portal-conductive walls were rare - they were always in places where you were supposed to shoot portals in order to solve the puzzle, and that's a bad thing. You entered a new room, and if you didn't see the solution immediately after looking at the entire room slowly in one walkthrough, you could even solve them by randomly shooting a combination of portals somewhere and see what happens. You didn't need to think enough.

In fact, the only time I needed more than 2-5 minutes on a puzzle was in that area where you have to spray white goo up into that ventilation system - I didn't see the room above the white-goo dispenser in the back of one of the platforms, so I wandered around 10 minutes just searching for anything I could do before finally checking a walkthrough on the internet which said "look up and use your portal gun to get into the room above" and I immediately facepalmed. *sigh*

But that's just the gameplay. There was a lot of story too, right? No, I didn't think so. There was lot of dialogue, yes, very funny dialogue, but it contained almost no story whatsoever. What did you learn about the Portal universe in the game that you couldn't have found out through other sources before the game was even announced? Not a whole lot. And the entire plot was basically: Follow an AI, help AI take over and watch it get insane, follow another AI and destroy evil villain.

We learned a little bit more in depth about Aperture Science's past, but really just more in depth about something that we already knew from Portal 1 (GladoS took over), but that was it.

The game also has almost zero replay value unless you're an achievement hunter, but that's not a point I'm going to criticize here, since that's to be expected from a puzzle game.

The game just didn't have very much substance - it had a lot of lightweight fun, but not substance. The kind of stuff that makes you think about a game even weeks after you've last played it.

All in all it was a very enjoyable experience. Everything was very well presented and it was a pretty cinematic experience - also very different from the kind of games we usually play. But it definately won't make my "Favourite 10 games ever" list, probably not even Top 20 or 30 (yes I played a lot of games in my time).

By the way, I considered writing lengthier reviews of games and post them here as blogs, but I didn't want to waste my time in case people didn't like the way I write or reason anyways, so tell me please if you would welcome that or rather not .