Portal 2

It's hard to believe it's been three years since the sequel to Portal came out; that advertising mega-blitz feels like only yesterday. Portal 2 was the game in Trev's collection I was looking forward to the most, and as such I held off until I was nearly done with his games to reward myself with one I knew without a doubt I would love. I was right, Portal 2 is awesome and a perfect sequel to the original Portal in every way. We pick up with Chell, the AI-destroying hero from the first game, still trapped inside Aperture labs and placed in suspended animation for a long time (thousands of years?) after the events of Portal. Stephen Merchant voices another personality core who attempts to wake Chell up and save her from the decaying wreckage of Aperture Science labs, and that's one of the biggest differences here in Portal 2- all of the slick and clean environments of the first game are now falling apart and overgrown with plant life. The task now is no longer to defeat a rogue AI but to escape the premises, but as walls fall down around you you can get a look at just how huge Aperture Science labs are and how difficult it will be to find your way out. Still though the game manages to keep up a brisk pace with Merchant's sidekick-bot keeping things interesting during the many testing chambers. As in the first game you're constantly bouncing back and forth between test chambers and behind-the-scenes areas that provide a rich and hilarious history of Aperture Science- J. K. Simmons provides the voice of Cave Johnson, founder of Aperture, who provides pre-recorded commentary as you traverse through some of the company's more dangerous experiments- including a fluid that lets you run faster, or another fluid that, when sprayed on un-usable walls, allows portals to be placed almost anywhere. Valve really took everything that was great about the first Portal to the next level; my only worry was that it would be too much of a good thing and that by making the sequel significantly longer Portal 2 might lose some of the magic of the first game. Nope. Not at all. Now I'm desperate to play through the equally-lengthy multiplayer content. Anyone want in?