Review by: Tom Chick

Portal was a succinct and economically told story, with clever puzzles in lieu of the usual shooting. Its shortness was in no way a shortcoming, unless you measure your games by hours spent. Which many of you do, so nice work. Because now it seems like the goal of Portal 2 is to make a longer game.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. But in the case of Portal 2 you get a lot of what painters would call negative space. Specifically, there's a long middle section intended to give the setting and the story some depth. Literally. It also adds a change of scenery and a new character, neither of which is particularly successful. But the rest of Portal 2 is as good as ever.

The real revelation here is Stephen Merchant, perhaps best known Ricky Gervais' lanky goggle-eyed collaborator for The Office and Extras. Merchant provides the voice for Wheatley, your bumbling sidekick robot. As comic relief and a major player in the game's central drama, Merchant is a perfect fit. He expertly manages to make every stammer sound simultaneously natural and carefully calculated for maximum hilarity. If there is better voice acting in a game, I haven't heard it. Merchant and Portal 2 are every bit as ideal a fit of actor with writing as Jack Black in Brutal Legend, Nolan North and Emily Rose in Uncharted, and Ellen McLain in the original Portal.

McLain, of course, is back and in fine form as GlaDOS. But the story shoves her aside and makes her a smaller player. This is disappointing after her monumentally central role in the original Portal, which was a love story between a murderous needy AI and her favorite test subject. GlaDOS was part mother, part psychotic girlfriend, part run-of-the-mill rogue AI, and part narrator. She was the combination of Valve's superlative writing and McLain's insight into its sense of humor. She drove the game. Portal 2 has a different agenda, and it wants to tell a different kind of story which only partly involves GlaDOS. It wants to dig deeper and longer, back arguably into a history that makes no difference. It's entertaining, to be sure, but it's missing the ruthless beating heart that made Portal so subversive, memorable, and heartfelt.

Of course, your character remains mute, which is briefly joked about before returning to its usual place as Valve's played-out modus operandi. It's a bit odd that they go to the trouble of fussing over why she can survive long falls (hi-tech leg bracers, natch), but they still have nothing to say about why she can't so much as grunt in response to a query. Perhaps such is the lot of the first-person perspective.

And then there's Cave Johnson, the founder of Aperture, heard in recorded messages and voiced by J.K. Simmons. Whether you know Simmons as the neo-Nazi in Oz, the father in Juno, or J. Jonah Jameson in Spider-Man, you probably know him. So Cave Johnson comes across as a stock character played by a character actor because that's precisely what he is. A clueless blustering CEO unconcerned with the little people or the fallout of his research is far too obvious. This sort of shtick works fine in, say, a Ratchet & Clank game. But when it squats squarely in the middle several hours of Portal 2, it's a mass of negative space. Partly because it's not terribly funny, and partly because it's not Wheatley or GlaDOS.