All flash, little substance.
So let's start off with the obvious good points.
This game is fabulously beautiful. This is quite possibly the best collaboration between the artistic and technical side of game visual development ever displayed in a game. The colors are excellent, the level design is fabulous, and the sheer size and scope of everything constantly amazes and never gets old. Add in the fact that the visuals in this game have their own particular style and the game is just amazing to look at as a whole.
I've heard a lot of complaints about the new prince, but he isn't all that bad. He reminds me of Han Solo. Anybody that played through Warrior Within and dealt with the groan inducing teen angst of that Prince should have nothing to complain about with this one.
The characters are deep, especially Elika, and they're enjoyable and interesting to travel through the game with.
However, there are some really terrible elements in this game that make it the single worst installment of the franchise yet.
Combat is awful. I mean spectacularly awful. The camera is fixed and often sits behind columns and the pillar of light from the fertile grounds during boss fights, leaving you unable to see anything at all except the gorgeous texture of the pillar itself while you get your butt whipped. There are various quick time events a la God of War, but many of them are pop up and vanish so quickly that you literally have no chance to succeed with them unless you've fought the same boss multiple times and know when they are going to come up, making it worthless to even have the button presses in the first place.
Every is ragging on the fact that you can't die at all, but it's not that bad. Especially not in the platforming aspect of the game. The bad part about platforming here is that it's all very watered down. Gone are there "Hmm, where am I supposed to go now?" elements of the previous Prince of Persia games. All it takes in this one is a quick press of the Y button and Elika shows you exactly where to go. I would prefer a good map and the means to navigate it by myself.
The fact that you can't die in platforming is just a checkpoint system, and it's way overblown as a negative point. That being said, it would be nice for Elika to have had some sort of gauge on her magic so that you could only die a certain number of times. Ubisoft would have greatly benefited by having multiple difficulty levels. Easy, where Elika's magic is unlimited and you have her compass. Normal, with the map and a limited magic meter. Hard, also with the map, but an extremely limited amount of Elika's magic.
As for combat, it's the same -- Elika will save you literally hundreds of times through combat alone when the camera is constantly thwarting you and throughout the various impossible QTEs.
I had the most fun in this game traveling from point to point, healing the lands, and experiencing the character growth between the Prince and Elika. What I did not enjoy, however, was Ubisoft's cheap attempt to lengthen the game by requiring us to collect the light orbs. I feel taken as a fool when I see things like this in games. It feels very much like Ubisoft realized that the game was way too short if they just gave Elika the abilities after finishing one of the four bosses, so they tacked this on. It's incredibly boring and drove me more than one time to turn the game off after finishing a boss, and turning instead to Fable 2 or Valkyria Chronicles. I ended up dragging myself back to this game several times in order to get the bare minimum number of light orbs by backtracking through previously conquered areas.
It would have been nice to see Ubisoft instead have a very limited number of orbs reside in extremely hard to reach places instead, and leaving achievements/trophies for how many the user could collect. Gameplay lengthening through a cheap tactic like this is never appreciated, and it's one of my main pet peeves with the video game industry right now.
One minor note that is impossible not mention. Turning the cranks. I frequently found myself dropping huge strings of curses at the impossibility to consistently press the right button to turn a crank. I would rotate the joystick in the direction that I wanted the Prince and Elika to turn the crank, and it was about a 50/50 chance that the crank would actually turn that way. This left me absolutely dumbfounded, as the same exact cranks have been in the Prince of Persia series since Sands of Time, and have worked with the joystick since then, yet using the joystick in this game to operate them is basically left to chance that you will actually turn it the right way.
All in all this game is very average. The platforming is fun but lacks the depth of the previous games. The combat is absolutely awful and is far and away the worst of all of the Prince of Persia games, which is really saying something since the worst part of Sands of Time was the combat.
In conclusion, it's starting to look like die-hard fans of the Sands of Time game will never get a similar experience again... Myself included.
