14 DAY TRIAL // Portal 2 has been out for over a week, and already a general opinion has been formed, even if there are some people that beg to differ with the big amount of praise received by the game.
We've already talked about quite a lot of things, from the game's lifelike robots and AIs to the decision to implement developer commentary and give gamers an insight on how Portal 2 actually took shape.
Now, we'll talk about the new elements introduced by the game and how, even if puzzles are now more varied than in the original, they're more intuitive than ever, thanks to smart design choices.
The original Portal amazed through its simple mechanics, allowing players to create two portals that were linked, and thus solve a big number of puzzles.
In the new title, Valve kept the same basic mechanic, but introduced a lot of new elements.
We have things like the aerial faith plates, which propel Chell, the main heroine of the game, as well as things like weighted cubes or turrets (for the Pturretdactyl achievement), a given distance through the level.
Then there are the lasers that can be redirected with the help of thermal discouragement cubes, enabling players to mess around with the rules of optics in order to make sure that the beams hit specific areas or objects, like turrets.
Players can also use hard light bridges to not only reach high places, but can also act as a shield in front of those nasty turrets, saving Chell's human body from the bullets of the devices.
Towards the end, there are also gravity beams, which keep Chell, cubes or turrents, floating through the air in a given direction.
The biggest additions, however, are the new types of gels, which include the blue repulsion gel, that enables players to jump really high, the orange propulsion gel, which allows you to gain a lot of speed, or the white conversion gel, that turns regular surfaces into ones that can support portals.
While there are certainly a lot of new things included in Portal 2, puzzle solving is at the same difficult level, if not a bit lower, largely because there aren't a lot of surfaces onto which you can shoot portals.
While some may not approve of this lowering of difficulty, I'm pretty sure that it will make Portal 2 a more accessible title, while still featuring some specific moments that are quite tricky to figure out, unless you're really skilled at solving the game's challenges.