Aperture Tag: The Paint Gun Testing Initiative


Disclaimer:
This is a mod for Portal 2. For you to be able to play this you must have portal 2 bought and installed on your computer as well.
Overall:
Aperture Tag: The Paint Gun Testing Initiative is a mod for Portal 2 that replaces the portal gun and gives you a gel gun. This takes an aspect of the Portal 2 campaign and expands it and gives you a campaign based solely around the gel mechanics. The mod comes with brand new levels that are a little more difficult than the portal 2 base game. These puzzles do require you to have a previous knowledge of how the gel works so do not play this mod without completing Portal 2. Not only does the mod give you a whole new campaign, but it also gives you community made maps, solo, and co-op. The main campaign is strictly solo, but the community made maps give you the option to play with your friends. However, since the community portion of the game is constantly evolving, we will focus on the solo campaign.



Story:
The story is much the same as Portal 2, you’re a test subject who is just going through test after test in the Aperture Science Lab. For the most part, much like Portal 2, the lab is in ruins. The mod gives you a whole new set of puzzles with a new voice actor walking you through them. He’s a little bit more straight forward and joking than the two characters in the main game. The campaign also has a good bit of length to it, it’s not some mod that you install and complete in twenty minutes and that’s it. Even if you were really good at the gel portion of the base game, this mod will still take you a couple of hours to get through. Unlike the base game, since this is just a mod, there aren’t exactly secrets. It’s a pretty cut and dry start to finish storyline with nothing cool going on on the side.



Gel Gun:
The ability to be able to spray the gels all over the place is a new take on Portal 2 and gives you a whole new way of completing puzzles. The one thing that’s kind of annoying is there’s no access to the water or clear gel from the base game. This means once you put a gel on a surface, you can’t remove it, all you can do is cover it with the other gel if you have access to it. Unlike in the base game, certain levels have the barriers that enable and disable your gun throughout the puzzle instead of just at the beginning and end. This causes you to either go through entire levels or portions of them only being able to use one kind of gel.
Downsides:
It’s hard to find many aspects of this mod that are troublesome. The biggest one is probably that the mod isn’t free. At the moment the mod is selling for $4.99 on the steam store. The fact that you have to pay for it does kind of suck, but at the same time, this isn’t some mod that one guy developed in his basement in a single day. This was a group of people who synced a lot of time into a mod that they had to put up on greenlight. This means that they spent time and money on a project that had the possibility of never making it to the steam store. Because of all of this hard work that was obviously put into this mod, I personally had no issue in paying for it. The only other thing is that being a mod and being developed by a small group, there are a couple of bugs. In playing through it I found a couple of spots you could get stuck and have to reload your save. There are also parts where you could abuse the gel tricks to get ahead of yourself in levels and I even found myself stuck in a level after hitting an autosave that I couldn’t revert. This caused me to have to start the entire section of levels over again.
Achievements:
This is a mod, there are none. This kinda sucks because I’d love to see this as a portion of Portal 2 implemented with achievements because you have the potential for some good ones.


Conclusion:
This is a really well put together mod for an already popular game. The fact that you have to pay for it does kinda suck but the mod is well worth the money. The campaign fits perfectly into the story for the base game. If you showed me this mod and told me that it was just a new part of Portal 2, I would believe you. The gel gun is a nice little twist to the puzzles in Portal 2 and took an already fun part of the base game and expanded it.
Links:

 Store Page Curator Review
Portal 2 Store Page
8/10
-Mufffinzz

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