Portal 2 review

The game as a whole doesn’t involve many puzzles that will stop you in your tracks for long, but when the hard ones finally show up towards the end, they really are tough. We have particularly unkind memories of a multi-stage puzzle that required us to use portals and anti-gravity funnels to knock out sentry bots by dropping blue goo on them before using the same goo to bounce yourself to safety. If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is.

Despite rarely holding us up for long, single-player mode provided hours of gameplay. In a couple of places, the plot feels like it’s been stretched out over more levels than are needed to comfortably explain it, but that’s a minor niggle. Even when you’re done with that, the game’s not over. As well as tons of hidden areas, Portal 2 has what is easily one of the most entertaining co-op modes we’ve played, requiring genuine ingenuity and teamwork as you and a friend take on two-player puzzles as test droids P-body and Atlas. Between that and a recently released toolset that lets you build your own levels, we expect to keep coming back until Portal 3 comes out.