Your Mileage May Vary
Dear god, what happened here? Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was game of the year. It was beautiful, it was entertaining, and it was so engrossing I have played through it more than a dozen times and had nearly as much fun on every pass after the first one. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, however...well. Let's just say I didn't play it for very long. Combat heavy, an emo prince and mediocre graphics made it a bad game no matter how you looked at it. Needless to say I wasn't the only one upset by the changes Ubisoft made to the franchise, so when they announced The Two Thrones they promised a return to what made The Sands of Time so wonderful. What did we end up with? A mixture of the two game styles, something with great potential but far more shortcomings than there should have been. It fundamentally feels like "that guy" from high school, the one that tries so hard to be cool but never quite gets it. I'd make some snappy comment, but in truth I was that guy so we will never speak of that again.
I wanted to like this game. I really did. I wanted so badly for Ubisoft to say, “you know what? We fucked up. We're sorry, and here's what we should have done all along.” I didn't think the idea was far-fetched; they made the first installment and should damn well know what made it so great. Playing The Two Thrones makes me suspect that the combination of wonderful ideas was an accident, something of pure luck and not design. It feels like they weren't sure what they needed to bring back to make the third feel like the first. There are far more environmental puzzles and challenge-style obstacles, but they are linear and simple, often utilizing only one aspect of the Prince's movement style at a time. Even at the very beginning the first game contained large rooms that required you to run up walls, run across walls, jump up gaps, jump down gaps, scale columns, and so on and so forth. A typical room in The Two Thrones would have you running across walls with perhaps a single jump or drop to reach the end, and while it might be a particular tricky set of walls to run across, it's more of a button-timing challenge instead of “how the hell do I get all the way down there?”
I was also fairly disappointed by the graphics. Maybe it was the heavy use of the light-bloom style of visuals, or maybe it was the engine itself – either way the first game felt smooth and polished. The second saw a grittier style, darker and somehow feeling more pixelated. Don't even get me started on the awful cut scenes, everyone looked absolutely hideous. The third installment drops the gritty style but retains the pixelated and rough look, and the cut scenes still make everyone look unbelievably fugly. The woman with him in the beginning is supposed to be his love interest, but all I could think is that the boy had to be desperate...or was swayed by the big tits and skimpy outfit. He certainly would not have been the first.
The audio was a bit more of a relief. Ubisoft went back and rehired the first voice actor to do the normal Prince's voice (there are two of them now), and this is a welcome change from the raspy and angry actor from the second. (He still plays a role as the other one, though.) The dialog returns to a more playful side, with the Prince making the occasional quip mixed in with the horror and anger at his home city being attacked. Speaking of, I don't feel it's fair for me to cover the plot in any detail. I didn't get far enough into Warrior Within to really know what's going on beyond the fact he's returning home with some woman related to the Sands of Time only to find his home under heavy siege. He is rapidly separated from said woman and is immediately thrust into the battle raging around him.
So why did I stop playing? In three words: The Dark Prince. At a certain point in the game you become “infected” by the Sands of Time and turn into a quasi-sand monster, a nod to the combat-intensive and darker second title in the series. I have no problem with the concept itself, it's actually kind of fascinating. The catch is your life – it's based on sand and it depletes constantly. You must locate and kill other sand creatures to stay alive, and you must do this while progressing through the level. I hate setups like that. It didn't take long to reach a room where I simply could not find any sand creatures in time and I continued to die over and over and over. With constant practice I was able to get a little further each time, but at that point I can only say screw it. I have better things to do than get that frustrated with what is to me a very poor design decision. The sand drains far to quickly, making the sections with the Dark Prince an exercise in constant repetition until you can find that magic pathway that is just long enough to make it a frantic race that you succeed at almost randomly when you get perfect timing from the environment moving around you.
I am secure in my skills as a gamer, so I feel no shame in saying that I simply did not feel like investing the time it would have taken me to pass through the Dark Prince sections of the game. I know that many people did and thought the game was fantastic overall – good for them. I'm not going to say that I think the game sucks outright, but I do think it suffers from some very poor design decisions. I got pissed, your mileage may vary. Take from this review what you will, and good luck if you decide to play.
