Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart

From World to World.

Most games in the survival genre are the slow-burning type. You often explore the map to find points of interest, gather valuable resources to craft upgrades, and locate sources of food and water to keep you alive. This is on top of the world itself, whether it is a desolate wasteland or a paradise that you can lose hours in. However, the creators of Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart took a different approach, trying to make a fast-paced survival game. Portals Apart is full of quick progression and fast-paced exploration, which leads to a game that has its resolution come out of nowhere, making it feel more like a proof of concept than a fully explored game.

Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart is an interesting survival game, as its title suggests the use of Portals. Each portal takes you to new areas with different challenges, bosses to engage, and the gathering of resources to create new tools and structures. Each world also has mini portals that change how each world looks and behaves, allowing new sights to see, keeping the world from feeling like a static environment. They are also where you find the major parts of new structures that you will need to keep progressing throughout the game.

In each world, you have two main problems that you have to deal with in order to survive long enough to actually make anything in the game. Those being hunger and the many different enemies that are in each world. The first one, hunger, is the simpler of the two challenges that must be overcome. The means to get food is easy as the game teaches you all you need to know on how to locate it in each world. Though in the last world, it is a bit hard to come by and find.

The second one, combat, is a bit trickier, but once you get the hang of it is very simple to understand and engage with. There is only melee combat here, so the only things you can do are attack or dodge. There is no range combat, no magic combat, or anything else fancy to the system to add complexity to the combat system of the game, making it an easy system to pick up. This can make it significantly more shallow than most survival games, as you often need range to hunt, but the slim presentation of Portals Apart keeps the game pretty lean, so your mileage may vary here.

The worlds are fairly small, making traversal quite easy even when the game has no map. Resource collection is also quite easy, thanks to the small size of the maps, as it is not hard to find anything that you might need to make what you want. This makes it easy to progress through the game at the pace that they want through the tech tree in game.

The tech tree is the main way to progress and understand what to do to progress. It is also the only real story element that you get here, as there is no other text or dialogue in the game to help build a story for its world. Even then, there is still little story to the game to help figure out what is going on. Again, this feels like a game that is more proof of concept than something fully fleshed out. So much feels like a placeholder rather than a spine of something that was meant to be built upon.

That said, what works here is that each world has a different and unique look to both the main part of each world and extends to the mini portals in how they look as well. The only problem I find with the looks of each world is the fact that they look a bit rough, with very little polish to them to make them look as vibrant as they can be at the moment.

Another area the game that feels rough is in combat, as some of its aspects are simple and a bit hard to handle. Some enemies also seem to strike almost instantly after they get hit making it hard to dodge any incoming strikes. There are also some controls that are unable to be used as they simply don't work at the moment.

In all, Grand Emprise 2: Portals Apart is very rough around the edges, but the concept the game has is a good one, even if it feels unfinished. Though the length of the game makes it a bit of a one-and-done type of experience, as it took me just under five hours to beat. I feel the game is best suited for those who are just starting out in survival games, as the journey gives a good taste as to what most of these games expect out of the player. Just don't go in expecting much.

Developer - TBJBU2. . Publisher - GrabTheGames. Released - August 5th, 2025. Available On - Steam. Rated - (N/A) No Descriptors. Platform Reviewed - PC (Steam). Review Access - Review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.