== Portal 2==

The sequel to the popular puzzle game Portal, how does it hold up?

===The Story===

It's a simple story; you wake up back in stasis after being frozen in time for 1000 years following the first game. The Aperture Science facility has fallen to ruin and you set off to escape with your new friend Wheatley, a robotic sphere, inadvertently waking up a very angry Glados along the way. You journey deep into the recesses of Aperture's past, discovering secrets along the way. It's quaint, it's funny, it's dark, it's amazing. Though far more complex than the short and simplistic plot of the first Portal, it is just as captivating.

===The Gameplay===

Portal is often dubbed one of the best puzzle games (if not the best game) of all time, due to its engaging puzzles and clever physics mechanics. This game adds lots of new features to the puzzles to make them more varied and interesting, including gravity tunnels and paint that makes you run faster or lets you bounce to incredibly heights. The puzzles are challenging and a lot of fun as a result. There are a lot more of them than there were in the original Portal, but they never get stale or boring, resulting in a much longer game which is equally satisfying.

I did find that there were a lot of rooms between puzzles that seemed to only be there to show off the graphics and artificially pad the game out with the occasional game of 'find the one tiny spot on the wall that you can actually fire your portal gun at'. I'm not sure why they felt the need to artificially make the game longer like this, after all the first Portal was only 4-5 hours long and was still incredible. The game would have been better if they'd minimized these between level areas, or actually bothered to make them challenging puzzles in and of themselves.

===The Characters===

Most interaction with characters comes from them narrating you actions over speakers in each room, since the protagonist is mute. As in the first game, each character is hilarious in its own way. Glados is delightfully dark and passive aggressive, making all the twisted jokes we've come to love her for, while Wheatley acts as her incredibly stupid foil. His accent is absolutely adorable and loveable. In addition to this, we get recorded narration from Cave Johnson, the bat-crazy and long dead founder of the facility, providing some of the funniest monologues I have ever heard. His sections of the game were by far the most enjoyable, and that's saying something given how excellent the rest of the game is.

===Multiplayer===

Multiplayer is a fun little extra campaign where you and a friend play as robots, solving a new array of puzzles. It doesn't have much replayability though, since if you've played it before you'll know how to solve the puzzles.

===The Graphics===

They are crisp and pretty looking as always, with some added variety thrown in due to the greater array of levels in different locations. Many of the rooms and set pieces are a lot bigger too, making the experience feel a lot more epic.

==Conclusion==
A must-play for any fan of Portal. If you haven't ever played Portal...why the hell not?