It seems to me that Valve saw the pop culture success of the original Portal and played to that. Great for marketing, fantastic for sales, but great for making a sequel? I don’t think so.
The main attraction to the game seems to be the storyline, which makes up the majority of the game. There are interminably long parts of the game that are death by expositional voiceover. All about the founding and original work performed at Aperture Science. It even provides two-by-four sized hints about the origins of GLaDOS, and explains her motivation for constant testing.
All that left me asking but one question: why did I need that? The best stories are the ones that leave things unsaid. Fill in the blanks, and let your audience make things up. As Yahtzee puts it:
Portal 1 was as tight as a walnet corset; not an inch of it was wasted… Portal 2 is a sightseeing tour that begrudgingly has a puzzle game in it.
I may be in the minority, but I found that despite the increased length (I finished Portal 2 in twelve hours, compared to the 4-or-so flash in the pan that was the first game), the levels flew by. I was genuinely stumped only once, at that was only two or three puzzles from the end. Call me rhetorical, but what’s the point of a puzzle game that doesn’t puzzle you?
I have to say that I’m astounded by the Metacritic score for the game. 95 is far too high for something that begins with what critics and fans agree is a perfect game and makes it longer, less funny and less challenging to the point of being laughable. The best writers know the value of a good editor lies in their ability to find things to cut out. Valve obviously hasn’t figured that out yet.