Game of the Year: Portal 2 (Developer: Valve; Publisher: Valve Corp)
If you’ve been following our Staff Picks, you’ve already had three hints as to which game won the award for The Married Gamers Game of the Year for 2011. It won Best Storyline. It took the title for Best Co-Op. It earned the dubious distinction of Game Most Likely to Cause Marital Strife.
If the gushing in our review is any indication, it should come as no surprise that the winner of The Married Gamers Game of the Year for 2011 is Portal 2 from Valve.
A sequel to the first Portal, Portal 2 adds to the mythos of its predecessor with an expanded story, more characters and mechanical tweaks to the puzzles. Valve stepped it up a notch by adding light bridges, gels and light funnels to puzzles that would have been challenging with a portal gun alone. The environments can be more cavernous, lending an air of grandiosity missing from the previous game. However, just like the previous game, when the light bulb goes off and you figure out the devilishly simple way get to a room’s exit, the feeling of relief and flash of genius is just as rewarding.
This time around, Valve even added a cooperative mode that has two players taking control of testing droids that must work together to find solutions to puzzle rooms that actually require two players. For many games that boast team oriented play, the word “cooperative” is usually just lip service. In this case, Portal 2‘s game design actually puts weight behind the term.
The icing on the Portal 2 cake (pun intended) are the personalities that populate the Aperture Science labs. Whether it’s co-op or single player, the characters and the writing that powers them elevate the game from rote puzzle solving to full fledged narrative experience.
For instance, Wheatley is a dunce AI and, by that description, an oxymoron (double entendre intended). That whip smart writing, coupled with the quirky and brilliant performance by Stephen Merchant make Wheatley a loveable character who nearly steals all the scenes he’s in.
Equally brilliant is J.K. Simmons’s portrayal of Aperture Science CEO, Cave Johnson. He delivers sharp lines with a booming vocal timbre that oozes confidence and commands respect. At the same time, the gung-ho, all go, no stop cadence adds a humor to contrast Cave’s sad story.
Of course, we can’t talk about characters and performances without mentioning GLaDOS. This omnipresent AI hurls passive aggressive insults from a seemingly bottomless bag of sarcasm. Voice actor Ellen McClain transcends the hint of auto-tuning to deliver lines penned by Erik Wolpaw, Jay Pinkerton and Chet Faliszek in a way that plays havok with a player’s emotions. Nothing shows this better than the punchline of the whole game where any humanity GLaDOS may have had is ripped away like bandage over a wound that hasn’t quite healed. Anyone that’s played the game will know what this is. Anyone that hasn’t played Portal 2… shame on you.
After you finish reading this article, go play Portal 2 for all the reasons mentioned here. In an industry bloated with first person shooters and its fair share of open world hijinks, Portal 2 delivers a high quality experience polished with mind-bending puzzles, great writing and oustanding vocal performances.
Well, now that it’s almost 2012, I might finally get around to playing this game.