Portal II

Portal II- (on steam, I played on PS3)
    Portal one stands for me as my #1 game of all time.  As such, the second iteration had a lot to live up to.  As a standalone game it was certainly excellent, but in comparison with the first I found it lacking.  What I really liked about the first one was the depth and complexity to which it took one, single mechanic.  With II, they introduced three different types of "gel," portally, bouncy and speedy, and also two types of "light bridge."  Personally, I found this to be overcomplicated.  I agree that something new would have been needed, but I felt that one gel and one light would have been more than enough.  The mechanics added however were basically aimed at allowing greater manipulation of your environment, bridges adding land up high, and gels changing where you can get to.  While thats an endeavor I would support, having multiple mechanics ended up meaning that giving the player too much freedom with them would make every puzzle way to easy, and restrictions were required on what could be reached when.  Those restrictions forced the puzzles into a much more linear nature than the first game, where all the rooms were portalable almost everywhere.  Being linear, I found the difficulty of the puzzles was generally decreased as well (and it wasn't that high in the first game).  Though it still felt unique, Portal II played a lot more like an "average" game than did the first one.
    In the same vein, I really didn't like the characters in Portal II.  As you probably have found out, Portal simply contains you (Chell) and Glados.  You never really see yourself, let alone develop Chell as a character, and so all you are really interacting with is this vaguely robotic feminine voice which is constantly lieing and berating you.  Despite that, Glados was a character I really found myself liking.  In the second iteration, Glados is almost immediately replaced by Wheatley, presented as a sort of bumbling idiot.  Glados becomes something of an accomplice as you seek to usurp Wheatley, not due to his being evil, but simply because he is incompetant and unable to run Aperture Science Buildings without blowing them up.  Not only did I find his idiocy annoying, but I found Glados going soft and playing nice to be wholly disappointing.  Outside of that they added more of an actual plot and character development to them, which, though well intended, I found to be a bit corny and cheesy and overall not very fun for the game.
    That all said, there was one thing which I really liked about the game--the multiplayer.  I actually played through all of the multiplayer on my own with two controllers, so I'm not sure I experienced the collaborative nature, but from what I did with my brother, they dealt well with giving us ways of directing each other and clearly communicating what we wanted done.  The puzzles however were a real step up from the single player game.  Having four portals instead of two meant that the complexity was naturally increased, and having two bodies to keep track of necessarily removed a lot of the linearity of the one-player game.  On top of that, they left off a lot of the extra whistles and bells, and when the gels and lights were present, I thought they really did add things and make fun mechanics.
    All this said, I did rather enjoy the game, and I do think its an excellent game, it only has these flaws in comparison with the first iteration.  Definitely still worth the playtime.

(I suppose at some point I should go back and review the original Portal, but that is a project for another time)