Portal 2 Peer Review DLC: fun, but missing the magic

One of the great joys of Portal 2 was the co-op campaign. It was smartly constructed, fun to play, and had more than its share of delightful moments, making good use of the extra complexities that a two person, four-portal world enabled. The first DLC for Portal 2, named Peer Review, has just been released, and it adds a fifth (or perhaps sixth, depending on how you count) chapter to the co-op campaign.

The original game's co-op chapters were each themed after the gameplay elements they introduced: gels, excursion funnels, and so on, mirroring the way the single player game introduced one new element at a time. The theme of the new chapter, "Art Therapy," is... art. GLaDOS has created a series of art installations that Atlas and P-Body are invited to appreciate. The art installations are, of course, test chambers, and the proper appreciation of GLaDOS's artwork often requires taking an acid bath or being dropped into a bottomless pit.

The chapter has nine different test chambers, using the full range of lasers, buttons, cubes, hard light, and so on. The test chambers are tied together with a loose storyline; GLaDOS is under attack, and we have to vanquish the attacker.

A leisurely playthrough of Art Therapy took my playing partner and me about 90 minutes. It took a little while to get back into the Portal groove, but once we got into the swing of things, none of the puzzles presented much of a challenge. If anything, the difficulty was a little uneven, with the hardest maps coming in the middle of the chapter.

Gels, turrets, lots of acid; you know the drill.

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Peer Review includes new ways of using the tools found in the test chambers—for example, combining laser redirection cubes with excursion funnels—and the puzzles themselves are solid enough, but we both felt they lacked some of the joy of the original chapters. There was one standout puzzle in the original chapters—course 3, chamber 8—that was enormously satisfying, a real Eureka! moment. Nothing in Art Therapy evoked that same sense of accomplishment or pleasure; we entered each test chamber, figured out what to do, did it, and then moved on. It was all a little mechanical. Diverting and modestly entertaining, but not particularly memorable.

The story element was also frustrating. The original co-op campaign ended with a massive reveal, of huge importance to the Portal universe (and perhaps even the Half-Life universe, depending on how related Valve wants them to be), and the implication throughout Art Therapy was that the final battle would further advance the story line. Not only did the final battle not advance the story—it didn't even exist. The big battle never came, with Valve instead opting for a joke ending.

In addition to the cooperative campaign, the DLC also includes challenge modes, for both the single-player game and co-op. In challenge mode, the game records the number of portals used and time taken to complete each map. Challenge mode was a feature of Portal and its omission from Portal 2 was strange. Peer Review remedies that, and then goes further. Results are uploaded to Valve, allowing you to compare your time and portal count both to Portal community as a whole, and also to your friends.

In Challenge Mode, flags mark the finish line.

Any map can be played and replayed in challenge mode. My interest in the mode was rather curtailed, however, because I could not make GLaDOS, Wheatley, or Cave Johnson shut up. Even if you didn't grow tired of Wheatley's schtick during the regular single-player game, challenge mode—where you might replay the same test chamber several times in a row to hone your technique and improve your scores—cranks up the annoyance factor to a whole new level. The same jokes, the same insults, the same everything over and over again, when all you really care about is getting through the puzzle as fast as possible.

I'd also still like to see a return of the advanced mode puzzles that were a feature of Portal. These took existing puzzles and then tweaked them to make them harder. For example, a map might have its floor replaced with acid, or turrets might be protected in cages to prevent you from knocking them over. This added an extra dimension to the game; it provided something for people who wanted tougher test chambers, rather than simply more of them.

If I had paid for Peer Review, I would be disappointed. There's probably enough content here that other companies would charge for it. But as free DLC, my gripes are much easier to overlook. If you aren't interested in the co-op campaign, Peer Review will be of limited value—but you're missing a trick, because the co-op campaign is a lot of fun. For everyone else, it's a worthwhile addition. Art Therapy may not have provided the sheer delight of the original campaigns, but I'm still glad I played it.

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