An absolutely amazing, funny, challenging, and ambitious follow up to the first Portal.
The gameplay and controls of Portal 2 remain the same, you venture through Aperture Labs with the portal gun and shoot walls with blue and orange portals to jump through to reach normally inacessable areas in the level. While Portal was relatively linear in scope, the game only featured you going through Test Chambers one through nineteen. Portal 2 makes use of the entire Aperture facilities and you venture outside of the test chambers regularly. This freshens up the environments and at the same time providing interesting backstory to the world of Portal. To develop this newfound mythology of the series, Portal 2 introduces new characters (without spoiling too much) that talk over the intercom. Their dialogue is absolutely hilarious and at the same time pretty dark, this game is generally light hearted but some of the themes are pretty heavy regarding the history of Portal. Glados returns as the crazed AI that she is, along with another supporting character Wheatly. Wheatly is a little ball shaped robot that you encounter during your journey. Both of these characters are important to the story and have great dialogue to go along with it.
The voice acting and sound design of the game is top notch. Valve has a knack for creating amazing presentations for their games and they do not falter in the sound design. There is not a lot of music to be had, but it always kicks in at the right moments and gets you excited for the upcoming action. Visually, this game looks phenomenal. It isn't the highest polygon game ever, but the art design, along with above average graphics, combine into a visually pleasing and facinating world to look at. The environments do all they can to change visually, you will see a lot of warehouse type design, but you really won't be thinking about that as you will be so engrossed in the gameplay, which is the most important thing.
New gameplay elements include various gels that you can manipulate that makes you bounce or run fast. There are also these beams of light you can manipulate to walk on. The last major element are these funnels that suck or push you through the air. It is hard to imagine using all of these at once, but later on in the game, the difficulty ramps up, but without being too hard. At most you think for 15-20 minutes trying things out, before eventually figuring out the puzzle. The game starts pretty easy if you have played the first Portal, but fourtanately the begininng of the game is mostly story and set piece based, rather than straight test chambers. If you have beaten the game and want to do a certain chapter, you are able to pick which chapter to play. There are no challenge or advanced maps, which is a little dissapointing, because completeing a test chamber in a certain amount of steps, portals, or time was a very unique and difficult task to achieve in the first Portal. Portal 2 features a robust co-op mode instead.
After waiting weeks for the PSN to come back online, I finally was able to play Portal 2 online with a partner. At first glance, its easy to fault the multiplayer as "impossible" because most people do not have microphones and having two strangers complete a puzzle with no ways of communication might seem overly daunting. However, the robots you play as are able to gesture and make marks on the wall telling your partner where to go and where to play a portal. The various areas are also not too agility based, so rarely will you have to make split second timing feats with your partner, which can be difficult. You can also play split screen with a friend at home. The co-op is all test-chamber based, there are not and large set-piece story moments like in the campaign. This is alright because it makes the action with your partner more gratifying. My only complaint with the co-op is that sometimes you randomly pick a partner, and then they have never played, so you have to go through the intro segment before you pick which test chamber genre to go in. A really nice feature though is that you can go back to any of the five test chamber genre levels and also pick which specific chamber to go in, which allows you to take breaks and not have to play for a long period of time. Overall, the co-op is a very nice addition to the game, and some of the most unique and interesting levels are found here, having four available portals makes for interesting challenges indeed.
In summation, Portal 2 is hard to really describe in a normal review. It is a thinking mans FPS, there are no stealth knife kills or neck snaps. If you value slower, methodical approaches to "Action" games like with the Half-Life series, then the pace and story of this game will be utterly beautiful. This could have been just more Portal levels with no story or context and I still would have rated this game high. The gameplay itself, without the story or characters or voices, is so amazing and unique that it is hard to play another FPS like Call of Duty without wanting a portal gun to manipulate around in! This is the best game of the year so far. It is also one of the best games ever, it is definitely in my top 10.