it's Portal But More, and by definition this means more of its strengths but also more of its weaknesses. Portal's lean-and-mean length meant that it didn't overstay its welcome and was said and done before you could really start to notice how barebones its design was, but Portal 2 starts to drag by throwing so much stuff at you that rarely if ever feels like it ever coalesces into a meaningful whole. rather than combining existent mechanics and building on them in increasingly complex ways like Portal 1, Portal 2 just kind of throws one mechanic after another at you. it's kind of cute how they seem to kind of acknowledge this by means of Wheatley literally just shoving random test chambers together in order to get his fix, though.
the grander scale of the non-test chamber levels once again mean the problems of the non-test chamber levels in the original game are exacerbated: those levels almost exclusively became games of "find a white surface to stick a portal on and then repeat", and the massive scale of the old aperture facility means that you're mostly spending a lot of time zooming in and haplessly shooting at anything that looks like it might be able to host a portal.
all this said though... while I think Portal 2 kind of lacks the game design magic that made the original catch on the way it did, I think the game's saving grace (and the solitary thing that makes it better than the original overall) is Valve managing to actually pull off truly great character writing for once in their games. the plot itself is a little hammy and showy, but honestly what you come for and stay for is the exact character that you always think of when you think of Portal: GLaDOS. from the moment she's revived to the last notes of the game's credits she's as charming as game characters get, and more than anything when I finish a puzzle I find myself looking forward to whatever deranged, morbidly hilarious, or strangely touching thing GLaDOS says next. congratulations to Valve for their major strides in the field of renewable energy: they've successfully created the world's first potato-powered dopamine machine.
the grander scale of the non-test chamber levels once again mean the problems of the non-test chamber levels in the original game are exacerbated: those levels almost exclusively became games of "find a white surface to stick a portal on and then repeat", and the massive scale of the old aperture facility means that you're mostly spending a lot of time zooming in and haplessly shooting at anything that looks like it might be able to host a portal.
all this said though... while I think Portal 2 kind of lacks the game design magic that made the original catch on the way it did, I think the game's saving grace (and the solitary thing that makes it better than the original overall) is Valve managing to actually pull off truly great character writing for once in their games. the plot itself is a little hammy and showy, but honestly what you come for and stay for is the exact character that you always think of when you think of Portal: GLaDOS. from the moment she's revived to the last notes of the game's credits she's as charming as game characters get, and more than anything when I finish a puzzle I find myself looking forward to whatever deranged, morbidly hilarious, or strangely touching thing GLaDOS says next. congratulations to Valve for their major strides in the field of renewable energy: they've successfully created the world's first potato-powered dopamine machine.