Here’s a game I’m not sure if I liked or disliked. I knew it was coming, I knew it was a reboot of the franchise, but it was low on my radar, what with all the other great games coming out. I wasn’t even on review duty for that one. It was on my online rental list and just happened to get to me before Victor got around to play it.

I was a big fan of the old Prince of Persia. Not Sands of Time and it’s sequels, but the ones back in the 90s. (or do they predate that? I don’t know) I have played Sands of Time to an extent, enjoyed what I got through and regarded it as a very good challenging game. Sadly, I got sucked on a puzzle and by the time I figured it out, I had to bring it back to the rental store. The game’s system was awesome. It just worked. I never got around the other two after that, though. So does the new PS3/360 Prince game lives up to its predecessor or does it fall flat on its face after one missed step? Read on to find out!

Gameplay

Well I can assure you that the game CANNOT fall flat on its face. Princess Elika will come up and save the day whenever there’s a need for it. What the hell am I saying? Well if you’re liked me and didn’t know anything about this game, well you’ll be surprised to find out that you can’t die in Prince of Persia. I’m starting with this, because to me it seems a pretty important part of the game. Elika, the princess accompanying you on this journey will save you whenever you’re in a situation you would die or be stuck. Fell off over a misdirected jump? Don’t worry, the princess will fly to catch you and bring you back to the last place you were standing on a platform that can let you stand still. So yeah, no Game Over screen here chump! What does it mean? The game is a cakewalk overall with only a very limited number of spots to make you struggle.

What happens if you get crushed under a boulder or a moving wall, or fell in a pit of spikes, you know, those expected traps in the Prince of Persia series, I feel you asking yourself? Well NOTHING since there’s not even one of those in this game. That was a fucken disappointment for me. This has probably been a result of the design choices, using an open environment, with no levels or anything, but instead a big (relatively) open-world to explore. Basically, you have to visit every areas of the game to heal the lands from the corruption it as suffered, due to Arihman’s and his minions’ actions. But to access passed the four first lands, you need to find enough light orbs to unlock one of Elika’s powers that let’s you access areas you can’t get without them. Before activating the first power. I was rejoiced at the thoughts of power ups. Oh what a disappointment that was too. While I’ll get to those in just a bit, I want to mention the basic controls, pre-power ups. There’s your basic jump, which you can double in length by using Elika for a boost, those will also save you from death from time to time. You can wall-run and swing on poles, climb on wall, your basic Prince stuff. You’ll also have sometime to press circle instead of X to swing off rings. The controls are semi-automatic on those things, as you only pretty much have to time when you’ll jump or press circle for the rings. The Prince will align himself to wherever makes more sense to go, most of the time. Elika follows swiftly all the time and doesn’t get in the way of your sight. But sometimes, she would just get on my nerves for slowing me down. The most frequent one is when you grab onto wallvines. Elika can fly, she can catch up to you no matter what without a single sweat. But when you climb on vines, oh there you have to carry her with you. So the game stops you from moving until she’s on your back, that takes about 2-3 seconds, but when you got one of those every 5 seconds at some points, it gets annoying. To me it looks like a quick bug fix where probably originally she would glitch or something when traveling on the vines. Also, sometimes you’re climbing up a wall with ledges to hold on to, and she gets over or under you and wants you to push her up. Why would you include such a feature that just breaks the flow of the game? Sure it makes sense in some kind of way, but Ubisoft, you’re breaking my fun when you do things like that.

Now unto the power ups, which I’ll tell you right now, sucks. Two of them just make you go from point A to point B with no interaction whatsoever. The third one has you flying, asking you to dodge things that would get in the way, but it sucks too because you’re never sure which side you’re supposed to dodge since you’re pretty restricted on movements. The last one has you running up walls and doing some dodging too. The last two are more mini-game-ish then they are power ups while the first two are just, well nothing at all.

Moving on to a quick mention of the game’s trophies. Almost half of them are basically given to you by finishing the game. Heck 3 of them are simply acquired by talking to Elika. And ending the game gives you 2 gold trophies. A bit of an overkill in my opinion in rewards for beating a game where you can’t die. Other things like doing specific things or not doing something during a boss fight is also easily done, since you can’t die anyway, you can take all the time you want. Anyway that’s all on the trophy side of things.

On to the fighting system! You don’t fight that often in this one, and always one on one. This is really reminiscent on the old Prince of Persia games; I mean the really old ones. Once you’re in combat mode, the control scheme changes as you draw your sword. This isn’t a free roaming combat style like Devil May Cry or God of War. You’re always looking toward your opponent. Like I mentioned, the fights are few and far between each other’s. You’ll fight one guard or two, then after that, all you’ll be fighting are demon-like creatures. Now the fighting controls are as follow. With X you dodge or do acrobatic attacks if you charge toward your opponent. With Square you attack with your sword. With Triangle Elika will attack for you as a “magical” support. Circle will have you using your claws glove to throw the opponent up in the air. Sometimes the enemy will change in a state where you can only damage the opponent with a specific attack. This state goes away once you successfully attack with the right button. You can also chain the different type of attacks into different combo. That’s probably the only fun part of the fighting system, that and deflecting with block the enemy’s attack, although 99% you’re probably better off just blocking, as deflecting the attack gives you no advantages whatsoever. You’re supposed to be able to counter, but that doesn’t work too well, at least it didn’t for me.

There are 4 main bosses you’ll fight 6 times each throughout the game, always right before healing the land of an area. Those fights can be fun, or annoying, or just plain too short. Sometime if you’re lucky, you can end a fight by throwing down the boss down the ledge of the surface you fight on. Although that’s not always possible since sometimes you’re required to do specific actions to beat them. One part of the fighting though is either love or hate. God of War fans might be happy to know that this game has QTEs. On my side, and I think it’s pretty much the same for everyone at The Save Poitns, I think that QTEs are bad game design. Sure, it gives a bit more scripted actions in the fight, but I lose my freedom to fight, dodge and block the way I want to.

On the puzzles side, there are about 5 in the whole game. Some are ridiculously easy, the rest you’ll get without needing to think too much either. It’s more interesting listening to the game’s dialog while doing those then actually doing them.

The game has a lot of platforming, being a Prince of Persia game and all. But the fact that you won’t die kinda ruins the whole thing, even though it’s pretty fun to go from one point to another, everywhere is pretty much the same, except with different decorations. First time you’ll go through an area, it’ll be covered in corruption and you’ll have to head to the boss, evading the corruption to heal the lands. After that, it’s orb gathering time. That’s actually pretty fun, there are 45 in each areas, and the game tells you for each area how many you’ve gathered. I found this really helpful when I needed to go back and get more to gain the next power up. It’s much more fun doing that then going through the corrupted part. As you’ll have to look for hidden parts and do trickier moves to get to some of them. Also, you feel much more free to go wherever you want to go. That open world idea wasn’t half bad. Sure it kinda removes the charm that I find in “levels” style gaming, but it gains something else in return. Also, if saving you from every possible death wasn’t enough, Elika holds your hand even more. By pressing triangle while platforming, Elika will show you the path by the mean of a flying orb to your next objective. (You decide yourself where that is). And you can use this as much as you want too. But one good point the game is the fact that most overall the control are smooth and intuitive, but maybe just too much.

Just a small mention, the game crashed twice at the beginning of the game for me. Didn’t encounter anything else after that though.

Story

Nothing complicate here, the Prince was on his way home with his donkey carrying all his gold loot when he lost her. He come across Elika which is running away from some guards. How much you learn about the story through the game actually depends on you talking with Elika mostly, has this is done manually by pressing L1 or L2. Sometimes I stopped for 3-4 minutes just talking to Elika to go through all the dialogues. The lines sometimes are so cheesy it’s hilarious, and the characters make fun of each other for these too. So at least Ubisoft knew that themselves. For some reason, I really liked that kind of implementation. I didn’t find much of the Prince’s past, much more of Elika.

To go back to the story itself, the Prince is dragged into the story as Arihman is readying himself to escape the prison he is kept in by Elika’s kingdom’s temple/palace/thing. Seriously, whoever thought of making a temple with such huge holes all over is very stupid. And the Prince mentions it too. So anyway, you’re on a quest to un-corrupt the land and save Elika’s dad from Arihman’s control. The game ends without setting much straight, and sets itself up “to be continued” for a sequel. The story itself was very cliché so don’t expect anything exciting there.

Graphics

This game looks great, no doubt about it. The cartoon look of the characters doesn’t fit everyone’s taste it seems though. The same cell-shaded look and the option to change the character’s skins to different ones makes for good refreshment if you’re tired to look at the same character. Though the game isn’t long enough for that in my opinion. That’s probably why most of them are only available after a first play through and other ways I don’t know since I haven’t unlocked all of them.

As for the world itself, it looks pretty good, except for the corruption which looks like crap to me. It’s some kind of overdone black ooze but just looks bad next to the rest.

Final Thought

The game can be beaten under 12 hours, although I certainly didn’t, since I didn’t get the trophy for beating it under that time. Although I did leave it on a few times for a while, when I’m eating diner and stuff, and there’s no actual clock in-game. While a lot of things annoyed me to no end in Prince of Persia, I had trouble going to bed because of it the three nights I played it because I always wanted to continue playing to heal the next land. There’s a nice feeling of completion for each land healed, although it doesn’t take more then 20 minutes for most of them. And gathering orbs is fun too and doesn’t actually feel like a chore, which I thought it would at first.

I definitely wouldn’t recommend buying that game though. But it’s worth a rent if you liked the other Prince of Persia games and you think that what I found annoying is not really a big deal to you. Ubisoft managed to fix the problem with pacing that Assassin’s Creed suffered, which was too long and too repetitive. They made a shorter game, yet it still lacks something to make it a great title. But who am I kidding, the game will still sell by name anyway and will continue to milk it with the next part of this franchise reboot.

David A. Games, Review