Portal 2 is for many, and me at the very least, one of the most anticipated games of the year. The sequel to the surprise stand out of Valve’s 2007 release The Orange Box. Considering The Orange Box contained Half Life 2 and Episodes 1 and 2, considered by many to be one of the best FPS games ever, Team Fortress 2, also considered to be one of the benchmarks of multiplayer games, that is an achievement all by itself. So Portal 2 has a lot to live up to.

The plot of Portal 2 is something that’s there if you look for it and pay attention, but it can also be ignored and just play the game through. Of course to get the most out of it you should pay attention and find the little details, but the gist of it is this. After defeating GlaDOS in the first game you were captured and returned to the Aperture Science relaxation centre and put in to suspended animation, and the game begins with you being woken up by Wheatley, an AI computer core who is trying to escape because something Apocalyptically bad has happened. After a sequence that shows you how massively sprawling the Aparture Science and Enrichment Centre is you’re thrown back in to the testing procedures in order to get the portal gun and try to make an escape. Now I don’t want to spoil anything here because this is a game that should be experienced. So I’ll not add any more about the plot.

If you’ve played the first Portal you’ll know pretty much what to expect, puzzles, humour and hidden little extras to look for that add to the fun and mystery of the games plot. The puzzles have evolved though and range from very easy to fiendishly difficult. Though all along they never quite push to the point of frustration and manage to balance it with making you feel smart when you work out what you’re doing. There are an assortment of new devices and elements in the puzzles. Light bridges and lasers and cubes to realign the lasers and more, along with the trusty weighted storage cubes and the faithful companion cube, so these new additions keep the whole puzzle solving fresh and interesting.

The humour has been taken up a few notches as well and it’s hysterically funny in places with lots of laugh out loud lines that are quotable and many sure to be internet memes before long. The new additions to the cast, Wheatley and Cave Johnson, have have many brilliantly funny lines, Cave’s in particular being almost every line he speaks.

As for the graphics, well the graphics are the one thing I can think people might gripe about. It’s using the same engine as Half Life 2, so at this point it is a 5 year old engine, and at times this does show. Though improvements have been made over the years and personally I think it looks brilliant, from the tarnished and trashed surfaces with jungle growing through them, to the shiny and new rebuilt test chambers it has a great style and interesting aesthetic to it all.

There have been complaints about the length of the game online, which I can’t understand at all. I’ve heard people say it’s a 4 hour game. Well it’s a long 4 hours. I played all day Thursday and a solid 3 hours on Friday before completing it. I’d easily say I played for 12 hours, maybe more, and I didn’t even go exploring to find everything. That’s not even mentioning the separate co-op game, which is a totally different game not just the same one with a second person with you. I can’t say much about the co-op, as I’ve only played through a few levels of it, but it’s a lot of fun and takes everything about the single player up to the next level, with 2 people and 4 portals to play with the puzzles can be that much more complex between you working together the scope of the tests can be much wider. If you can complete this game in 4 hours I don’t know how you’re doing it. It is easily worth buying, even at full price. Especially considering the PS3 version comes with a redeemable code for Steam so you get a copy for use on your PC, too, though they can’t both be played at the same time. Easily my favourite game this year, and highly recommended.