After nearly 5 months (almost half a year, Jesus Christ), Valve has finally released the first Portal 2 DLC pack into the wild. Titled “Peer Review”, it features a new co-op testing course, or track, if you prefer: “Art Therapy”, it’s called. It takes place… well, that’s best left for you guys to discover. The pack’s also got the brand new Challenge Mode, for both single-player and co-op. Much like Portal 1’s good old Challenges, except they finally got rid of that bulls**t “Least Steps” mode. God, I hated that thing.

No new advanced chambers, however. As a matter of fact, there is no new single-player content here at all. There aren’t even any new hats!

And the online leaderboards? Well, you’ve got Friends leaderboards, but if you’re expecting huge ranked, worldwide leaderboards, like in Serious Sam HD or Hard Reset, then would you kindly lower your expectations, because the closest thing to that is a graph nestled in the Challenge Mode window. There’s also no way for you to see your previous high scores, or your friends’ previous high scores. It’s a good system, don’t get me wrong, but it’s lacking some pretty fundamental stuff. In any case, let’s move on – there might be a full review of Peer Review on the way soon . You can expect to see another “Vic’s Thoughts On” kind of article for that. Except I’ll never put “Vic’s” in the title. And, hopefully, it won’t be as big. Or as critical. But stranger things have happened.

To celebrate Peer Review’s release, Portal 2 is now on sale through Thursday, at a good 50% off. That’s 15 dollars for one of the finest games of the year, or 11 euros, if you live in the United States of Europe. They don’t exist… yet. I’m sure that by the time Portal 2 takes place (52,000 AD? 2500 AD? 2050 AD?), there is a USE of sorts, and it is ruled by a sentient cloud. And they’ve always been at war with Oceania. Which is ruled by… what’s left of LambdaGeneration. Except the letters got smudged up during post-apocalyptic times and now people read it as “LlamaGeneration”. Crazy stuff.

The DLC should be downloaded to your game automatically, as a game update. The size is around 723 MB, so you should be able to get it fairly quickly (took 2-3 minutes on my connection). And if you’re a console player, then you can probably pick the DLC up on the various online marketplaces. Again, completely free.

What are you waiting for, then? Call up your coop partner, play some Challenge Mode in the mean time, and get ready for some… review! Of the “performed with a peer” kind!

I have to admit, I might have just wasted that joke. Could have used it in my upcoming DLC review: “Let’s review Peer Review!”. Eh, that would have been pretty silly.

http://thinkwithportals.com/blog.php?id=6430