Imperfect Game: Portal 2

Hello and welcome to Imperfect Game, less of a review blog and more of an experiment in how long I can talk about my favorite video games and today am covering Portal 2. Portal 2 is the highly polished sequel to the original Portal. Like the original game Portal 2 is about solving puzzles around using a portal gun and the weird physics only possible with portal technology. The Story takes place after Portal 1 where the player defeats GLaDOS and is broken out of some kind of stasis room that's surprisingly homey by a core named Wheatley and starts their plans to escape from Aperture Science Laboratories.

The gameplay involves shooting portals on white walls and surfaces and making use of these portals to solve puzzles and navigate the levels usual things like Black walls and windows don’t let you create portals on them so you have to get creative. In addition to the usual portals from the first game, there are also new tools for solving puzzles in the form of laser redirecting cubes, jump-boosting and speed-boosting gels, Light bridges, Jump pads, lifts, and even white gel that makes dark areas white so your able to create portals where you normally couldn’t. The game does a great job of teaching its mechanics for the most part though I had resorted to using a guide to solve a few puzzles. The music is great and its gameplay is adaptive so when you mess with stuff like the gels or lasers you’ll hear bits of music special for those objects, it’s a small detail but I personally love this feature of the music. As for the rest of the music, it has this nice electronic vibe going for it and I think that's fitting for the themes of science and technology. I loved the part where you go deep into the earliest test chambers where things look like they are held together with duck tape and glue, it is where you hear a lot about the character Cave Johnson how I think is the founder of Aperture Science who is later found to have died from an illness from using moonrocks to make the white gel.

The first dozen gels levels were my favorite as you exploit their use to do crazy jumps. While the main story mode is short the game offers a co-op experience which I don’t know anything about due to being a loner but there is a steam workshop for this game that has user-made levels and a level editor so even after beating the main story you could either play user levels or make a level or two on your own. The Graphics of Portal 2 look good even on even on my potato PC, it's the classic Valve Software look and feels The game has a great range of level aesthetics from the overgrown areas from the early levels with a prerecorded message being played assuming the world has ended and while being trapped inside Aperture there is really no way of knowing if the world has ended or not, these levels show how long the player character has been in stasis and it has themes of nature vs science to me this makes it all the more impactful when GLaDOS wakes up and cleans up all the overgrowth like she is actively fighting against nature. Nature is symbolic of the outside world which the player is actively trying to escape so I think this bit of symbolism is pretty neat. I don’t have much to say on the cleaner and more sterile test chambers are it is a bit plain looking like a bathroom more than a test chamber for science.

Also, GLaDOS is very mad that the player character killed her in the last game so you’ll be hearing quite an angry robot until you reach the midpoint of the game. Then you have the rough and weathered-looking chambers deep in old Aperture where you are first introduced to the blue jump gel and orange running gel and get to perform sick jumps as you get to listen to Cave Johnson’s dialogue. Now am going to spoil a bit of a major plot twist so if you are interested in buying this game please do yourself a favor and leave so you don’t ruin the surprise if you're like me who is perfectly fine spoiling the story then let's get started.

You see at the halfway point of the game your friend Wheatley takes over GLaDOS’s body and thus controls everything in Aperture as planned earlier in the game but Wheatly then turns on you and goes mad with power and then shoves you into the deepest parts of Aperture where you get sent to old Aperture. Now when you finally make it back to the newer parts of Aperture you see he has been busy making cube monsters and his struggle of trying to get them onto a button.

This is the part where Wheatley starts literally mashing together test chambers to create his own tests for you to complete. After escaping from him you begin the final boss of the game which the game prepared you for by teaching you how to use bombs and white gel to solve puzzles and later fight against Wheatley who shields himself forcing you to place portals to direct his bombs back at him. The final boss is tricky but thanks to the game’s autosave you shouldn’t have too much trouble playing until you win against it. Inclosing Portal 2 is a great game, It makes you feel smart and clever while letting you experiment with Portal physics. Get it on sale as it’s a Valve game and since Valve owns Steam the game should be on sale regularly and that's how I got my copy of Portal 2 This has been Imperfect Game and thanks for watching.