Let it be known that Portal 2 is a fantastic game. As far as sequels go it had some big shoes to fill. It is bigger, has more variety and is more fleshed out than the 2007 original, and it pulls it all off almost flawlessly. Almost.

You see, Portal 2 has loading screens... a lot of loading screens. One of the things I loved about the original Portal was how immersive it felt. This was partly due to minimal, or at least well hidden, loading screens. You might have spent a little time on the elevator while the next test chamber loaded. Some games, such as Metroid Prime, hide these load times by having a door that takes forever to open. In Portal, the elevator rides didn’t even seem to particularly take that long. There was an instance or two when the game needed to load in the middle of level, but again these were minimal and hardly noticeable on the overall package.

In Portal 2 however, loading screens are abundant and immersion breaking. While it is still primarily kept to the elevators between test chambers, you are now taken out of the game world into a loading screen. While seeming to be the same concept as a long “hidden” in-game load time that doesn’t make much a difference since it still mainly occurs at the elevator, the fact is that when we are taken out of the Aperture Science facility for those brief moments the immersion factor is broken. And that makes all the difference.

What this also does is break up Aperture Science, this HUGE facility and game world, into smaller, more confined chunks. It creates a sense of “Okay, let’s move onto the next level,” rather than moving onto the next part of this huge world. There are also a few instances where the game has to load in the middle of an area, these just freeze the game rather than taking you to a loading screen. It’s particularly disengaging when these occur during an escape sequence. Again it breaks up the immersion as well as the tension of the scene.

But I’m not unreasonable, it’s not like I don’t understand why this had to be done. Portal 2 is a big game with a lot more content than its predecessor. More things mean more things to load, that’s the trade-off. Nevertheless, it’s still an amazing game that deserves praise. It’s almost to the game’s credit that one of the few things knock it for (nitpick, even) is something that’s present in many other games as well. Maybe it’s the fact that Portal 2 is so good that this otherwise usual occurrence seems like a bigger blemish than it would elsewhere. It’s that tiny coffee stain on the big beautiful white carpet staring back you.