Portal 2 kicks off with player waking up in the Aperture Laboratories, the human behaviour research facility from the first game, and finding out very quickly that things have gone haywire. Still, Valve has managed to go one better than what its team created before, and then built on its impressive foundations. The game seemed like lightning in a bottle and a sequel sounded unnecessary. The first Portal, released in 2007 as part of the Orange Box, was a short, ingenious puzzler wrapped up in first-person-shooter mechanics, underpinned by a darkly comic story about scientific research taken to dangerous extremes. Well, thankfully, Portal 2 isn't the game that's going to cause this, which is remarkable when you consider it's arguably the sequel of 2011 with the toughest act to follow. Valve's winning streak has to get snapped at some point, doesn't it? And if it does, the knives will be out in force.
On the whole, the titles that Valve has produced have been critically lauded and have sold very respectably.īut if the history of art and entertainment has taught us one thing it is this: if you habitually make genius look easy, audiences and critics will round on you if you stumble, even more viciously than they would have done if your track record was of a mediocre quality. It's not that I think the developer has put a foot wrong so far, or that its latest release won't meet the impossibly high expectations of its audience. S trange as it may seem to start a five-star review on a note of concern, I worry about Valve.
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