Why yes, I did decide to play Portal 2 after Portal. And yes, I have played Portal 2 before. But! I haven’t played this Portal 2 before. I shall explain.
What I’d never realised before, is that co-op mode in Portal 2 is not Portal 2 with two players. No, it’s a completely separate game. Different levels, different plot, different player character(s), just all set in the same world as Lonely Boi Portal 2. With two players at the same time.
With two players, you get two pairs of portals. Although they’re not linked (so player 1’s two portals operate independently to player 2’s), they can be entered by either player. What this means, is that the level puzzles aren’t just twice as complicated, they’re exponentially more complicated to solve. That, and you absolutely must work more closely as a team than any other game I’ve ever played before. Yes, even more so than something like Overcooked, where one player can pick up the slack for the other – you can’t so that here.
To illustrate this, I present A Video.
And that was a pretty simple example.
I played through the game with my daughter, and coming up with solutions together was great. There’s a fantastic “point at somewhere and the other player will see the marker” feature, which is invaluable for “put a portal right there” moments. It certainly meant less marker pen on the TV, anyway. There are also a number of useless but fun emotes the two robots (Atlas and P-Body) you play as can perform, like dances and high-fives, and you can’t not play something like this without accidentally on purpose pushing, or portalling, your co-op partner into the acid or ineffectually shooting them over and over with your portal gun for no reason whatsoever.
An added complication with two players was that because you have two players, often the solution to get one player to the goal doesn’t match the solution for the second player, meaning that we needed two solutions much of the time. Things were made somewhat harder for us because, somehow, we started the game by playing through Area 6 without realising, and that’s the final set of levels in the game and certainly the most difficult. A bit of a baptism by fire, really, but it did mean we were absolute pros when it came to playing Area 1 immediately afterwards.
Such a great game, and also a massive shame there’s no follow up. More co-op games like this please.
