Portal 2: First Look

The two beloved characters from the original classic will both be returning for the sequel. Chell and GlaDOS. The return to Aperture is not known, but we're glad to be back, even if it is in ruins. The companion cube is also back, along with Wheatley, a new "personality  sphere" companion. You meet this strange little robot when you see Wheatley suspended above the aftermath of Aperture. While the chatty little guy goes on about how glad he is to finally have freedom, he asks you to catch him when he falls. Maybe not, he's up pretty high. Okay, he's begging you to save him. Chell doesn't catch him and he falls flat on his eye sensor. Ah, the humorous charm of Portal is still here.  

 

We then see Wheatley  being lifted by Chell and used to hack open a hidden door in the wall. The two new friends enter this door and ride a conveyor belt. You continue riding past another robot, who Wheatley refuses to help, and you move ahead outside to see GlaDOS in ruins. The body comes to life, and Wheatly can't shut the evil computer down. Plan B is to "stay still and don't make eye  contact," but you are easily spotted. GlaDOS simply says. “Oh, it's you. It's been a long time. How have you been? I've been really busy being dead, you know, after you murdered me.” followed with the familiar line "I think we can put our differences behind us. For science. You monster."

One of the major goals for Portal 2 is to “re-surprise people”. Give them that same sense of joy they got when first playing the original Portal. In order to do this, there have been several changes to the gameplay. First up is a  tractor beam, a bright blue flowing stream of particles that grabs objects in a  direction and flows leads them through the portals you've created. A demonstration showed the tractor beam being used in different ways to take out sentry bots, by leaving them to continuously fly through the air.

 

Then there was the aerial faith plate, a hydraulic  pad that  sends anything placed upon it flying. We saw this also used to rid a room of sentries by shooting a portal underneath them, and making them fall through another portal onto a pad, then creating another set of portals to launch him through, that would eventually lead to the death of the bot. The thermal discouragement beam is a laser beam that can be used to cut through objects, such as, you guessed it, sentry bots. This was followed by the pneumatic diversification vent. You know those big tubes you see outside of certain banks? Yeah, it's kind of like a huge version of those. It serves as a vacuum, so when placed above sentry bots it can suck them up.

All of these new gameplay additions will uncover so many new ways to solve puzzles (and get rid of those pesky sentry bots). By the looks of it, the presentation isn't taking a dip at all, with some awesome encounters and dialogue in just the short amount of time we were able to see of Portal 2. By the way, we've been promised that Portal 2 will be “significantly longer” than the first, not to mention there will be co-op this time around. which puzzles should be made  a bit more lenient or a bit more challenging. Portal 2 is already nearing completion, and we can look for the game on PS3, PC, and Xbox 360 in 2011. Here's to hoping it is as genius as the first.

Logan Smithson, NoobFeed