Category Archives: Puzzle Game Reviews

Review: Scribblenauts Unlimited

Posted on December 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

Created by 5th Cell who… .have only made Scribblenauts… it’s SCRIBBLENAUTS UNLIMITED!

The Brief: Player Input Games

There was a time when all games required player input in order to work.  Whereas instead of playing the game you would have to guess at what were acceptable commands

Most of the games were RPG games in which you would input text commands and get a response.

Most of these games came with examples of acceptable commands but did not contain all of them.  A lot of these early games had a lot of discovery and guessing.

A typical command might be like:

“Move South”

And the typical response would be:

“Moved south.”

You would have to follow this up by asking what is around and then responding basedo n what is in the area.

There were no graphics and there was only the text.

As Apple and IBM began engineering graphical based programming new games designs were coming around.

Although Prince of Persia would no doubt transform the entire industry away from this way of playing there were quite a few games using the old input format.

One of the most famous of these games was Leisure Suit Larry.  In this game you were a sexual pervert walking around town looking for ‘tail.’  You could insert over 100,000 expressions and quandaries per game.

The end result of these sorts of games is that after playing them you would try again just to see how else you could play them.

Scribblenauts continues in this tradition.

Synopsis

Scribblenauts is based around collecting stars.  Collecting stars is necessary for completing levels.  A star is obtained by helping eight people complete their tasks.

These tasks are given to you by roaming around the map and talking to people or analyzing things around you.  There is a ‘star vision’ that will aid you in figuring out where exactly stuff is.

A person will have a problem.  In order to solve it you can do one of two things.

The first is create an item they might need or an item that will help them in some retards.

As an example maybe a car is broken down.  Well how can you help someone who has a car broken down?  Maybe you get booster cables!  Maybe you get a mechanic!  Maybe you need a robot.

Question: What does a tree find artistic?

Question: What does a tree find artistic?

The fun of the game is coming up with creative ways of solving problems.  The game will have you type out what you want.  If it is not available it will pull up a dictionary involving an adjective and a noun.

So if I type in “Michael Jackson” and that is not available it could pull up “major janitor” as a possible match.  It also allows me to choose adjectives and nouns to help with that.

The other way to aid is to add an adjective to a person to change their proportions or looks.

The game plays as a 2D side scroller and uses very cartoonish graphics.

Strengths

  • Child Friendly
  • Open Ended
  • Funny!
  • Steam Workshop

When I was growing up there was this great game called ECO The Dinosaur.  It was a simple child friendly game designed to teach you about environmentalism and recycling.  It was done from the perspective of a click and point adventure game.

Most child games are click and point adventure games.

This game gives us a child friendly game in which I child can learn to spell, solve simple riddles, and have a tonne of fun.

Create any item you can think of

You can solve problems by giving people a new description

The game is very open ended.  You need to collect 30 stars and there are going to be about 60-70 stars on the map.  So realistically you will have a lot of fun just doing whatever you want.  if you can’t figure out a problem now, you can come back and solve it later… while solving other problems.  I hate linear puzzle games that want you to just sit down and look at a single puzzle until you are driven MAD!

The game has a fantastic sense of humor… unless of course you don’t have one… in that case nothing will have a good sense of humor.  In one scene a cannibal came forward asking for food.  A child is supposed to learn here that cannibalism is eating humans.  After serving the cannibal a human (I chose to feed him a  teacher!) the cannibal joked to me “you look delicious too.”

I ran out of things to do… until I saw the Steam workshop.  The game gives you the ability to make literally anything.  I made V from V for Vendetta for giggles.  Other people have made entire Star Wars sets and entire (puke) scenes from Twilight.  The game gives a lot of replay value for anyone interested in creating a creature.  It could easily end up like Spore which had people creating Simpsons planets that could randomly invade you.

Weaknesses

  • Casual
  • Liberalized
  • Weird Story

For more hardcore players this game will not offer much.  Total gameplay comes up to just under 5 hours.  For a more hardcore gamer this is just not going to offer much of a value.  It is a $30 purchase and does not offer any replay value for anyone over the age of 12.

The game has a liberalized sense of the world.  By this I mean that everything is neutral of names, cultures, religions, and race.  In fact the only thing it maintains is the classical male-female roles and relationships in the world.

No game is complete without a zombie mode

No game is complete without a zombie mode

In one instance a priest was in a haunted house and he wanted me to help him get rid of a ghost.  I was reminded of that scene from the exorcist in which three priests with bibles were reading off prayers and upsetting the ghost.  So I typed in bible… didn’t show up.  I typed in the word “holy book” and a bible popped up.  It’s something that is very specifically designed this way in which it picks up a Christian cultural character but neutralized all the words around it…. or liberalized.

This of course does not stop the game from having female fire fighters with pink hard hats or crying girls wishing their boyfriends were not such jerks.

The story to the game is really really odd.  It’s one of these instances where a game developer makes a great game and the story is an after thought in which it tries to explain the story.  Through out this game you will never really understand this story fully… because it never makes sense.

Because of the lacking context the game will be a lot less appealing to anyone over the age of 12.

Concluding Thoughts

I think this game is fantastic and a must have for anyone under the age of 12 on PC or on Wii-U.

For anyone else though the game is going to be a meh pick.  For people who played Scribblenauts on the Nintendo DS are going to enjoy this game.  But for everyone else it won’t appear as anything particularly special.

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Steam Sales Review #31: Q.U.B.E.

Posted on October 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

Well this time around I’ll be looking at Q.U.B.E.  This is an indie game developed by Toxic Games in the style of Portal.

The Brief: The Puzzle Game

Puzzle games have been around since the beginning of time.

Puzzle games are unique from other games in their intent.  While other games are designed to be fun and something to do in your spare time puzzle games were designed to stimulate the brain.

Puzzle games were a passing craze in Europe that came in and came out.  In Asia however puzzle games became a common part of life.  At early ages most toys that Chinese children would use would involve some sort of mental challenge.  Often these challenges would involve marbles and mazes.

In print puzzles were common in the form of mazes.  Eventually the adult puzzle “Sodoku” came into existence in 1987,  This puzzle game involved using mathematics and number assignment to fill in the blanks.

The first real puzzle game to hit consoles was Tetris.  The first to hit PCs was no doubt Minesweeper.  This games were simple, but highly addictive.  Tetris became such a big puzzle game that world competitions were held between powerful Tetris players.

Puzzle games largely vanished.  They became replaced with normal games with puzzle elements.  Puzzle games stopped becoming interesting due to their limitations.  The closest thing to a puzzle game to come out was Prince of Persia, a climbing puzzle game.  However Prince of Persia also involved a tonne of combat to cover the lack of attention people had.

Valve software engineers were playing around with a pure puzzle game called Portal.  Up until Portal there was not a successful puzzle game in a long time.  They were so uncertain that this game would do well that it was originally included as a bonus in the Orange Box sale.

The Orange Box included Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal.  Half Life 2 is often regarded as the biggest first person shooter of all time.  This single game was big enough to push Valve into mass digital distribution.  Ep 1 and Ep 2 were minor treats.  Team Fortress 2 is one of the top 5 first person shooters of all time.

So within this list Portal shouldn’t have had a chance.  As it turned out people loved it so much that Valve worked on a stand alone sequel called Portal 2.  With the success of Portal among some of the greatest games of all time the market heard a clear message… puzzle games are back.

Synopsis

Q.U.B.E. stands for “Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion.”  This phrase refers to the simplicity of the game controls and the simplicity of learning the basics.  In reality it is just a short hand used in place of “Cubes” the main function of the game.

The entire game is made of cubes, other than the hands that control them.  The game is very distinctively white and black.  The manipulative blocks are all colors.

Red blocks slide a single block multiple possible lengths vertically.  Blue blocks are spring boards.  Yellow blocks create one of three possible patterns of elevated blocks.

The game features puzzles involving physics in which you can spin various elements of the room around like a rubix cube for the proper combination.

The game also features magnets in which the force of magnetism will pull objects towards them.

Green blocks can be stacked up to gain some extra jumping distance.

Green balls need to be rolled to their objectives.

This combination of elements can be used to create puzzle elements in which the only objective is to leave the room.

Compared to Portal this game is very simple.  This works to its advantage.  Playing Portal a lot of the time it was never really clear what the objective was.  With QUBE it is simply to leave the level using the blocks.

As you activate new elements and play with them you immediately understand what you should do.  It should be noted that not knowing what you’re supposed to do does not make a game more challenging.  Often in this kind of game once you figure out what you have to do, they are actually quite easy.

Instead QUBE sets you in a room with various puzzle elements and you simply have to put them together.  As your proceed through the “sectors” the game gets more and more challenging.

The controls are simple.  Left click activates items and right click deactivates items.

Strengths

  • Interesting Puzzles
  • Great Graphics

It almost felt like this game was made for people who had already played Portal.  In this game you are forced to think outside of the box and use puzzle elements similar to Portal in order to move objects.  For the first 4 or 5 sectors the game offers little challenge.  For the last four sectors however you are griping with what do you do.

The game runs on the Unreal engine and looks fantastic.  It runs smoothly and has no inherent graphical flaws that come with most games running on Unreal Engine.  A lot of the shine of the game comes from the basic cube nature of the graphics.  But hey a good looking game is good looking.

Weaknesses

  • Price
  • Play Time

It might just be a genre related thing.  Basically this game prices at normally $20 for 3 hours of play.  If you grab it on sale it goes for $5 for 3 hours of play.  In any other game that would be a waste of money.  This is especially true considering that this is a one time play through and you’ll never want to replay it.

It’s kind of like those Sodoku books which once you burn through them they’re done… yet you pay the exact same price as a novel you might read multiple times.

Conclusion

As far as puzzle games go it is somewhere between Portal and Portal 2.  It’s not quite as good as Portal 2 but it’s still a little better than Portal.  At full price this game is not worth a purchase.  At 75% off the game is basically worth a purchase.

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Steam Sales Review #22: LIMBO

Posted on March 17, 2012 | 3 Comments

Some three years ago a game called LIMBO came out.  LIMBO was so good that it started a rush in the industry to really pump out more and more indie games.  LIMBO was made by 10 people total with a budget of under $200,000 and has since paid its weight in gold.  The game regular sells at $10 and on sale goes for $5. So I’ll be looking over the game and at the end of this review I will give my buyer recommendation.

The Brief: What is Limbo?

In an attempt to bring the old world to the new world medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas coined the term “the underworld.”

Thomas Aquinas is the guy who comes up with all of those ridiculous questions like how many angels can stand on the tip of a pin?

Any people were really worried about the afterlife and worried that there were so many people who they felt did not deserve to go to the underworld and yet were going there.

Thomas Aquinas had an answer to this.  You see the underworld is divided into four principle parts.

The first and most popular is Hell of the Damned (yes he invented hell).  This is where the fallen lord Satan resides.

The other three parts of the underworld include Purgatory, Limbo of the Patriach and Limbo of the Infant.

Purgatory is this place where a person isn’t really that bad but committed a few minor sins.  By minor I mean little things like white lies.  If you confess these sins you can avoid purgatory but a lot of people despite living good lives go to purgatory as a sort of Heaven prep school.

Get paranoid because everything is a trap

So a lot of people liked this concept but they asked “what about the people before Jesus?”  These people were stuck in the Limbo of the Patriach until Jesus was born and “set them free.”  An alternative purpose of this Limbo of the Patriach is a place where non-Christians go and if they do not accept their sins and do not train as Christians they are stuck here for half of an eternity learning to become Christian.  This interpretation was the first to be rejected.

A final part of the underworld Aquinas invents is the Limbo of the Infant.  A lot of people were asking “what about unbaptized babies?”  Well if a person is too young and is quite innocent they go to the Limbo of the infant.  Here they are raised as Christians and constantly tested until they are ready for heaven.

This was the standard interpretation of the afterlife by the Christian faith until the early 1900s when Pope John-Paul 2 destroyed all non-Hell underworlds and kept a black and white interpretation that there is simply heaven and hell.  Of course he also made it much easier for people to get into heaven.

Many faiths still believe in this break down of religion including the Mormons, Quakers, and most American protestant faiths.

Synopsis

So you are a child who has died in your previous life and are now in purgatory.

The game is a 2D side scroller that forces you to have precision control.  If you do not hit every jump perfectly, you die. Death is probably one of the better parts of this game.  Although it is cruel there is also something kind of cool about seeing a boy get impaled by a spear, chewed up by a spider, get smashed by a stomper, get caught in two cogs, drown, or get electrocuted.

The controls for the game are very simple but if you do not have a gamepad, don’t play.  There are two buttons, drag and jump.  You need these in order to solve the various puzzles you will encounter.  The game features many dynamic elements that have interaction between static and non-static objects.  You will many times have to even use physics to solve puzzles such as movement.

The game is very punishing if you do not have absolute perfection.  If you are an inch off a jump or miss a timing by a split second… you die.

That’s alright because the game has a large number of checkpoints that happen every 10-15 seconds worth of play.  The game is split into roughly 20 chapters as well so you can quickly go back and forth between favorite parts of the game.

Strengths

  • Cool Concept
  • Challenging Gameplay
  • Easy to Learn
When you look around you see a world that is aesthetically pleasing.  Behind your little dude are some of the traps you just past, sometimes they are crushing other boys and other times they are just moving.  There are tones of elements that make you go “what is that” as you explore this afterlife.  The framework of the game is excellent and very fun.  There are other games that have tried this theme, but none that have done it this well.
The fact that you are controlling a boy very much adds to the golden effect of the game.  You feel sympathy for this poor boy who is forced to endure this and are inherently sad when he dies.

Watch out it's a mind slug

The gameplay is challenging which is good for the side scoller community which demands harder games.  The difference is that this game is not frustratingly challenging.  Although you will get upset when you die the checkpoints are done so well that you will just feel like you can crush through this easily.
As a final strength I will say the game is easy to learn.  The game has a way of slowly introducing you to more and more elements until eventually you don’t even realize that’s an element, you just do it standard.  You will start to realize over time that if you are spiraling down a hill you should be prepared to time a perfect jump.

Weaknesses

  • Low Bang for Your Buck
  • Too Short
  • No Story
The game is about 1 hour worth of gameplay total.  It took me about 1.5 hours to finish the game.  One hour worth of gameplay at $5 on sale and $10 full price makes it on sale the price of a full price movie and full price makes it the same value as bringing a girl out on a date to the movies. That’s a pretty terrible deal for a game.
Side scrollers are generally shorter but they have a lot of things to do that give them replay value like high scores, collectibles or non-linear levels.  This game has none of it.  It has one hour of 100%ing the game gameplay.  If it had less linear gameplay you could play it multiple times.  If it has levels and you could somehow get a high score you could compete with other people.  If it had collectibles to unlock bonus features you might be tempted to run through and try and get all of the colelctibles.

Sitting under a ponder trap

But it has none of that, which makes it a very terrible value.
On top of that the game has no story.  This is the mystique of the game and I get that.  But some parts of the game just begged for a story.  Early on in the game you run into a pack of kids who are trying to kill you.  Why are they trying to kill you exactly?  You start off at limbo and immediately decide to push forward.  Why?  Why does it matter that you continue on.  It’s limbo, why not just continue dying for all eternity.  Even the ending (which I will not spoil) is kind of odd and leaves a lot of eye brows up.

Concluding Thoughts

I know I’m going to get a lot of flack for this… but I just can’t recommend this game.  It is just too damned short.  As much as you may enjoy this game it will be a short experience.  It is like going on a roller coaster at a theme park.  Once the roller coaster stops you feel empty again… because it is over.

You might want to play the game because it is a cultural phenomena that was well received.  But if you are looking to occupy your time with a game, this one just isn’t it.  You can complete it in a single sitting (which I did) or stretch it over 2 minute play sessions.

There is just no way to really stretch it out.  At the current pricing there are hundreds of games that will be just as fun but will give you far more play value.

When people bought Portal which had a similar price point single value it was not a question that it was worthwhile purchasing.  This is because Portal was packaged in the Orange Box with a lot of other great games.  When Steam put Portal on at $9.99 that was after the Orange Box and after people stated they wanted Portal specifically…. that and Portal gives you four hours of gameplay.

In the end there is no way to justify Limbo as a purchase.  It just does not give you enough bang for your buck.

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Steam Sale Review #13: Orcs Must Die

Posted on January 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

Orcs Must Die is quite possibly the game that has gone on sale the most.  This is because it is an indie game that pretty much topped it’s sales and is slowly trying to just get extra revenues for more development.  The key is to sell a person a cheap copy of their game and then sell them DLCs.

I finally got around to buying Orcs Must Die on it’s third sale when it went down to $4.99.  I know this is a little expensive for an indie game considering I spend less than that on AA or AAA titles that go on sale… but it’s a game I actually wanted.  This game has I believe 3 DLCs (downloadable contents) available now with expansion maps.

What is Orcs Must Die?

Orcs Must Die is by no means a cultural phenomena, but having said that it has had a pretty strong player base with it.

Orcs Must Die is categorized as a casual game.  It is one you can pick up at any time and one that you can stop at any time.  All levels are insanely short and will not occupy too much of your time.  You however will always be trying to figure out ways of doing the levels better by deploying different groups of traps and gaining better multipliers for a high score.

On the flip side of the casual game is a high score ladder that a hardcore might want to grind out.  As said, they will replay this over and over and over until they’re #1.

The goal of this game is to kill Orcs and prevent them from hitting the portal.  There is never any real inclination of what this portal leads to or what it is for however it is always hinted that guarding these portals is of the utmost importance.  This reflects heavily on the early Warcraft storyline where a wizard does the opposite, he leads the Orcs into a portal to Azeroth.

You are a mighty wizard and you take over the role of a recently deceased wizard who you were apprenticing with.  You have a set number of magical powers (sword attacks, magic crossbow attacks, and force push) but the main point of this is deploying traps that Orcs will run into.  The Orcs will follow non-specific paths.  Each map will involve multiple paths of attack as the Orcs desperately rush to the portal.  You will need to deploy multiple trap types and barricades to crush various orc types as well.  The goal of this is generally to force the Orcs into a single choke where multiple trap types will create higher bonuses when hitting simultaneously.

This may sound a bit similar to basic tower defenses games.  That’s because, it is. The difference is tower defense generally never ends, in this game you have to survive 4-5 rounds of Orc attacks before you are victorious and you do a little dance.

Much like casual games these come with many difficulties with Nightmare being the ultimate super hard almost impossible to beat ones that people actively compete for.

Strengths

  • Tones of puzzles/DLCs
  • Challenging Nightmare modes
  • Nub friendly

This game is bustling with content.  If you beat every puzzle the first time through finishing everything will take you about 4 hours.  Then if you do the Nightmare modes all the way through in a breath you will do all of those in 4 hours.

But a lot of these puzzles are hard and it will take you some time to figure it out.  I logged off the game and 30 days later, the answer came to me.  Yeah I have been playing this game over a long period of time.  This isn’t my normal style of playing games.  I usually play them all one at a time.  But much like a lot of my philosophical studies this just came to me.  I logged in and finished the puzzle with the solution.

Other people like to bang it out and try multiple combinations until they get something that works.  There are numerous tactics guides but honestly, who plays a puzzle guide and looks for the spoilers?  Spoilers on YouTube are not a weakness of the game it is a weakness of people who are playing puzzle games when they in fact do not like puzzle games.

This is not the same as people posting strategies for how they got some super high score.  These people are looking for challengers to take down their high scores (which are posted online).

The game has a normal difficulty which is a single play through.  After you finish it you unlock nightmare mode which makes the orcs more abundant, stronger, faster, and higher healthed.  Once you finish all of these nightmare modes Orcs Must Die currently has two DLCs priced under $3 each.

As a final note on strengths the game is very friendly to a person who is new to the puzzle genre, especially this game.  As you go through the game you are introduced to different traps.  You are also given the opportunity to mix and mash traps.  As you go through the game you will see through the architecture what trap types you should be using.

Weaknesses

  • Aesthetically poor
  • Weak Leveling System

The game is unfortunately poor in aesthetics.  This is a puzzle game and puzzle games are not well known for having plush graphics.  Do not expect anything rip raging when you get this game.

Instead what you should expect is a game with very cartoony graphics.  Evidence of this is the game’s “head shot.”  Head shotting simply requires for you to aim your trigger at a pile of orcs and click.  Head shot will happen pretty random.  It will make you feel like a million bucks until you realize you can get like 20 head shots in a row.

Everything animates properly but I can honestly say I felt there should be more blood and more body parts flying around.  There is some of that but only enough to keep the game at T (FOR TEEN) instead of M.  The deaths are also not all that unique.  When you get stabbed with two different types of blades the orc dies the exact same way.

The game also features a weak leveling system.  You get a Skulls rating for finishing a level.  You use these skulls to purchase upgrades.  Basically by the end of it you have every upgrade.  In a persistent leveling experience you should be given choices and punished for making the wrong ones.

This game much like a lot of games gives you a faux leveling system that is simply just delaying the true strength of abilities.

Concluding Thoughts

This game is a welcome surprise and a breath of fresh air for the puzzle genre.  Most puzzle games you think of are 2d top down type games.  The whole of tower defense is based around the standard top-down RTS design.  When you play this you get a 3rd person shooter that will allow you to actively join in on the tower defense with head shots.

I think more than anything else it is the fact that you are always doing something that attracts me to this game.  In most games involving traps you sit there and wait.  Not this game.  Sometimes you will need to get just enough headshots to pass this level… not to mention nightmare mode.  The game has a limited amount of customization but you can eventually unlock all of the power ups making your choice far less important.

Worth the time, probably not the price.

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Steam Sales Review #13: Portal 2

Posted on January 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

Portal 2 was named the 2011 Game of the Year at the VGAs.  But many people question the validity of the VGAs.  The VGAs decide best games by going to popular gaming websites and magazines and having editors pick choices.  It is really the only video game show.  But every year there are some video games that upset people and cause them to question the validity of this show.

Gears of War 3 for example beat out every single MMO, all of the shooters (MW3/Battlefield 3), all of the online puzzle games, and every RTS game to be deemed multiplayer game of the year.  So many people were upset about this mostly because the most popular multiplayer games are Battlefield 3, MW3 and MMOs.

Portal 2 however being named game of the year raised a few eyebrows.  Yes the game is good… but is it that good?

I got a chance to find out.  Valve put their game on sale for $9.99 and I had a coupon for an additional 33% off putting me at a friendly $6.66 game (devil’s game?).  Seeing as this AAA title is costing as much as most of the games I buy on sale it is time to give it a legitimate look.

Synopsis

Portal tells us the story of an unnamed female mute who is trapped in a testing facility and forced to do endless tests until eventually you catch up with the computer controlling it all named GlaDos and killing her.

As the story goes you are sent to a relaxation facility which acts as a sort of cryogenic rest.  The machine in charge of your sector Wheetley is somewhat incompetent and out of all of the people in the facility you are the only one he can save from near doom as the planet itself is ending.  It’s never exactly stated why or what is ending it just that the world is over.

As you move along you and Wheetley accidentally re-activate the evil robot GlaDos who sticks you back in the maze and forces you to do puzzles.  In a short come around Wheetley comes up with a plan to take over GlaDos body and get you out of there.  Wheetley however is easily corrupted by power and makes you run some tests of his own.

You uncover a secret subplot where you find out GlaDos was once a human being named Caroline and Wheetley is an incompetent boob that the human President of the Company strictly forbid from taking over the company.  The President is magnificently played by JK Simmons who manages the same zeal and enthusiasm as GlaDos.

The game runs 5 hours for a clean run through with about 2 hours of multiplayer content and challenges.  At 7 hours it means you are playing this game at about  $1,20 at the original discounted price.  That’s quite expensive.

If you are new to the Portal franchise it should be noted that Portal revolutionized the puzzle genre.  Before Portal came around puzzles sort of just focused around manipulating a few blocks, dropping blocks, aligning lines, or other basic Tetris like functions.

There are other puzzle games and they usually involved finding items around a room and putting them together to solve some larger puzzle.  As a matter of fact the better puzzle games were showing up on the handhelds leaving the PC market pretty open and unchallenged.

When Portal came around it caused a stir that is unknown in the industry, word of mouth.  Word of Portal spread faster than any other game before and if you didn’t play Portal you probably had heard of it.

Portal is best known for its portal gun.  This little gun for the nubs would allow you to create a wormhole entrance and wormhole exit allowing you to easily traverse around.  The portal gun is used as a tool for solving puzzles as you must move yourself and objects through these puzzles.

Portal 2 will involve a large number of puzzle items including:

Blue Goo: A bouncy liquid

Orange Goo: A liquid that will increase your velocity

White Goo: A goo that allows you to make portals

Bombs: Destroy pipes and bosses

Anti-Gravity Beams: Will hold you up and push you forward

Bridges: Solid blue beams that you can stand on.

In many instances you will have to use many of these tools and the force of physics itself to beat these tests.

Each test is a level with a modicum of difficulty.  The game will increase in difficulty and then shift down in difficulty as it adds in new elements.  The game constantly has you think outside of the box to figure out how you can complete this ‘test.’

Aesthetics 9/10

The game runs on the Valve engine which is used for games like Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike:Source and the upcoming Half-Life 3 game.  This is by no means a bad thing.  The graphics in all of these games are highly customizable and can be set to very powerful to insanely weak.

It is the flexibility of the graphics in Portal 2 that makes it great.  I obviously choose to have them set to the max however the game can be played on a very wide array of computers.

The graphical style is cartoony and makes use of very basic shapes.  All of the robots are spheres and prisms while all of the elements in the game are cubes and saucers.  But everything looks smooth and sleek.  When you look at a reflective surface it reflects magnificently.  I don’t know anyone who could not find this game aesthetically pleasing.

The game also does not feature blur vision.  This is something annoying put into games that when you make fast movements you blur.  This allows the game to handle the graphics load.  This also, sucks.  It might be realistic but it ruins the vision of the game.  Portal 2 doesn’t have this.  When you go supersonic you see everything as you would normal speed.

Noobie Experience – 8/10

I have always said that puzzle games are almost inherently un-user friendly.  Puzzle games are simple and have basic elements you have to manipulate and because of this the puzzle genre rarely ever gives you a sense of tactics.  In an RTS for example they will list out some basic strategies and indicate to you how to deploy them.  In an FPS you get concepts of cover, various firearm types, and roles.  Even in side scrollers the game generally explains how the controls work and what moves do.

But in puzzle games often you leave these devices to the user to figure out, a particular weakness to the puzzle game that many games have tried to improve on.

The latest Tetris release (Tetris Splash or something like that) has actually put in place an easy mode play where you can actually see where the blocks will land and in what way.  This way a person will see and be better able to learn and deploy tactics for multi-line clears.

Portal 2 is a step ahead of the industry in this regard.  You are introduced to one portal (the blue one) first and about an hour later introduced to the orange one.  You are slowly introduced to elements in the game and how they work.  You get an idea of how tactics work for solving puzzles and how you can deploy multiple tools at once to score a win.

The one weakness I found was this white ooze they put in the game.  I honestly did not find that this was explained very well.  I spent a good 5 minutes spreading this white stuff everywhere before I realized that it was actually making all of the surfaces portal able.

Portal 2 does explaining things better than most puzzlers, where it might lack in this department comes in the necessity of a zoom feature.  With zooming it means they can place objectives in retarded spots that you could never see if you don’t zoom around.  That’s just stupid and makes the game awkward and confusing.

Bang – 5/10

The unfortunate side to this game is that it is not as hard as Portal 1 was and it’s not nearly as long.  Playing through the game is far too easy and all of the puzzles are just obvious.

I paid $6.66 with a coupon, but the average sale will bring this game down to $9.99.  At a 7 hour run time you will be getting about a $1.42/hour value out of this game.  That’s pretty high cost for a game.

The unfortunate truth is that once you finish it there is no point in playing again because the puzzles don’t change.  It is entirely a one-time playthrough with a one-time playthrough co-op.

Opinion – 8/10

What an amazing franchise this is.  I would get frustrated at some puzzles and I would get some of them easily.  The game makes things hard to give you a true sense of reward for completing things.

I wasn’t exactly a fan of the two multiplayer robots they invented to deal with multiplayer death.  Being the shorter one is just awkward.

But there is a huge thumbs up for recruiting JK Simmons to do this game.  JK Simmons does a tonne of small bit roles in movies and is the bald head of the American President in Red Alert 3.  JK Simmons is funny and his voice carries a tonne of respect with it.  This is why he is the perfect person to be the president of the company.

The game unlike its original also unravels a real story.  You get to hear about how Caroline becomes GlaDos, why GlaDos became evil, and a little bit about yourself.

Overall it is a pretty great experience however due to it being a puzzle game with linear puzzle design it isn’t worth a replay.  I would give this game a perfect 10/10 if it had puzzles that would change, a sort of randomized free roam mode reward for finishing the game.  Unfortunately it does not have this.  The game is in serious need of a post-game online campaign mode that will level up an avatar or something along those lines.

Conclusion – 7.5/10

This game is as amazing as it is epic.  One of the downsides to this game is that it is a lot of the same stuff as Portal 1.  There are many improvements including some multiplayer, a real story, and new puzzle elements.  However a lot of the glory of the old Portal was the genius of GlaDos who is constantly misleading you and tricking you.  It is made like a world gone wrong where you are promised silly things like cake as a reward for testing to further prove you are in fact a gerbil to this individual.

The sad truth is to people who have finished Portal 1 this is just a DLC pack that will offer new puzzles to figure out.  For new people it is a must have even though the game played time to money invested isn’t all that great.

Think of Portal 2 as that movie you REALLY want to see.  You COULD wait a year for it to go to DVD for $1.99 rentals or digital download for $0.99 but you REALLY want to see this movie.  So you go to the theater and throw away $10 for a ticket, $4 for popcorn, $3 for the drink and you have to get your girlfriend and iced tea.  But it’s totally worth it, you’re going to enjoy your time way more by getting it now then, then.

It’s the same thing with this game.  Yeah it’s more expensive than most puzzle games and will end a lot faster… but it is worth it for a newbie to the franchise.

For someone who has played Portal they have probably already bought this game and come to the same conclusion.  This is definitely a great game of the year candidate as it brings a very unique experience worth the investment.

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