Quick Game Reviews – Portal 2, Return To Monkey Island, Don’t Touch This Button!

Portal 2 – Great – Take a classic first person, physics based puzzle game with wacky but likeable robots and expand on the lore with new environments that lead to some wild, exciting gameplay segments. Wheatley and Glados’ rivalry is a lot of fun to listen to as they order the player around to defeat one another. The puzzles are challenging and annoying enough that I had to quit a few times, but nothing felt so unfair that I couldn’t work it out after a break which is the mark of a really good puzzle game. We keep the classic portal based puzzles and get the extra stuff of coloured goo which would allow bouncing, speed or extra locations for placing portals. A seriously clever game that’s great as a brain teaser, gives a sense of achievement and has a multiplayer mode.

Return To Monkey Island – Good – The classic style of point and click adventure comes back with the great pirate Guybrush Threepwood having a new control scheme that doesn’t involve as many verbs and a new art style. The game has all the charm that the old games carried with puzzles that mostly involve observation and memory this time around. We see returning characters, references to pop culture and have plenty of fun with a tale that seems to lead from the end of Monkey Island 2. I think it’s a lot of fun, but as a puzzle game there’s some puzzles designed to be unnecessarily frustrating with a hint system that’s just too easy to fall back on rather than properly thinking things through, add in a confusing, disappointing ending that goes for goofy nostalgia more than anything and we get a fantastic experience marred by the writers inability to complete a story. I genuinely thought it would get it right this time but it’s still highly recommended for those that like to listen and figure things out. Plus one of the achievements was broken when I played.

Don’t Touch This Button! – Average – A first person puzzle game where the player can sprint, jump, pick up and throw boxes with the aim being to push a certain button which will unlock the next level. With Sixty-six levels in total, all short and interesting enough to keep the brain ticking, this game provides a good level of challenge as you try to put your brain on the same track as the developers. The game lies to you constantly and you generally just have to work things out. This is quite a good game that’s easy to control while being fun to work out but lacks plot, dialogue, characters or length to make it worth much money. I’d recommend it if you can get it cheap.


I did these reviews short because it’s hard to avoid spoilers otherwise.

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