Merchant's prattle might chafe with some players, but I loved his deflating, humanising effect on Portal's cold brilliance. That's also thanks to the great voice cast. Portal was a sequence of great jokes, but Portal 2 is that rare beast, an actual video game comedy – and one of the funniest ever. It's both shameless and devastatingly successful in its pursuit of belly laughs as GLaDOS gradually lets her bone-dry quips slip into withering sarcasm and Wheatley does that Britcom blend of surreal nonsense, self-mocking blather and slapstick. The script, by Eric Wolpaw, Jay Pinkerton and Chet Faliszek, is a riot. Another commentator joins this intimate cast during an unexpected second act, which parodies BioShock while shedding some light on Aperture's past – but I really should stop there.Īperture Science welcomes back Eurogamer. When your sardonic, deadpan tormentor GLaDOS is rebooted, a strange and darkly funny psychodrama starts to develop between these disembodied voices and your silent avatar. Wheatley begins as your guide and comic foil, a village-idiot version of Halo's 343 Guilty Spark. You're woken from stasis by a chatty idiot of an AI called Wheatley, an expressive steel eyeball given verbal diarrhoea and an English West Country twang by Stephen Merchant (Ricky Gervais' writing partner on The Office).
#PORTAL 2 LAB RATT CRACKED#
Many years later, a disaster appears to have befallen Aperture Science's labs and the clean white tiles of familiar test chambers are cracked and overgrown with vegetation. Once again, you are Chell, the ponytailed woman in the orange jumpsuit who was GLaDOS's unwilling test subject in Portal. The tutorial for the controls even contains a brilliant interactive gag at Valve's own expense. That's clear from the opening, when you awake in a containment cell that's not an antiseptic glass cubicle but a simulacrum of a shabby 1970s-style motel room. This is a new Valve, though, riffing on the cartoon comedy of Team Fortress 2 and the weathered B-movie pastiche of Left 4 Dead as well as its stock-in-trade cool sci-fi. (Far from insignificantly, it's also a major video game that involves virtually no combat.)Īlthough its warped humour is miles away from Half-Life 2's oppressive tone, it is absolutely recognisable as that game's successor and equal, and thus the first full-scale Valve epic in over six years. It has Uncharted 2's easy way with a one-liner or action set-piece married to the intricate brain-teasing logic of the best Zelda dungeons. Portal 2 is a riveting and hilarious entertainment. Inevitably, it's more talkative, the humour is broader, it contains some ideas that don't work as reliably, and the fiction's delicate relationship with the Half-Life universe is disturbed.īut the sacrifices are worth it a thousand times over. It would be impossible to expand that haiku of a game into a 10-hour blockbuster (with a separate co-operative campaign for two players) without muddying those crystal waters. It's so tight, so deliciously underplayed, that criticism passes through it like light refracted through a jewel. You can't call Portal heartless, it's far too funny a game for that, but it does have a heart of ice. They almost surreptitiously slipped a neat parable of a story past you, sealing it with a punchline so resounding it knocks you back in your seat. They gave that mockery a cool, cruel and bitterly dry voice in GLaDOS, the arch AI that keeps you company in the game's pristine prison cells.Īnd then they lifted the curtain, just an inch, and let you look behind it. They teased you with a premise that mocks your status as a lab rat running through their devious maze. Its creators took one fantastic idea and developed it exactly as far as it needed to go and no further.
#PORTAL 2 LAB RATT SERIES#
Valve's 2007 puzzle adventure – a short story about escape, in which the player must solve a series of spatial riddles with a gun that shoots doors – has a ruthless clarity to it, an economy of form and expression, that few games can match.
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