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Prince of Persia (2008)
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
With the Prince of Persia movie well on its way to fruition, I'm actually kinda surprised that Ubisoft didn't just decide to make their "Prince" look like this. I mean, come on. I think I speak for all gamers when I say that Jakey Gyllenhaal would be our first choice.
Reviewed by
Mitch Saltzman
Prince of Persia (Ubisoft)
In an attempt to recapture the magic of The Sands of Time, Ubisoft decided to launch another revival of the franchise with Prince of Persia for the Xbox 360 and PS3. We’ve got a new Prince, new setting, new love interest, new combat system, and a breathtakingly unique artstyle. But is it the glorious resurrection that the Sands of Time was?
Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say that it’s not.
The story kicks off with the Prince being lost in a sandstorm while searching for his donkey, Farah (a nod to fans of the Sands of Time games). All of a sudden a beautiful young lady named Elika falls into his arms and then quickly takes off running from her pursuers. The Prince follows Elika to a large temple where she confronts her father who is about to remove the seal on the dark god Ahriman, thereby spreading corruption throughout the kingdom. Despite both Elika and the Prince’s efforts, Ahriman’s influence is released and now it is up to the two of them to purify the land and seal Ahriman once again.
That’s pretty much all you have to go by in terms of story from the start to the end. You see, Prince of Persia doesn’t progress in a linear fashion like most action games do, which means that the story can’t progress in a linear fashion either. Snippets of story regarding Elika’s past, the Prince’s past, the locations you’re traveling to, and the enemies you’re fighting are all revealed via optional conversations with Elika. The problem is that outside of some funny and pointless exchanges between Elika and the Prince, these conversations aren’t very interesting and will generally leave you regretting pressing the button that initiated them since you can’t skip them once they start.
Now you may be wondering how a game like Prince of Persia can be made in a way that uses non linear progression. The truth is that it’s almost like a board game.
At the start of the game you’re able to go into any one of three interconnected caverns. These caverns branch out and lead to the four main locations of the game: The Vale, The Ruined Citadel, The City of Light, and the Royal Palace. Each main location is made up of smaller areas that each contain what’s known as a Fertile Ground. By bringing Elika to the Fertile Ground and purifying it, Ahriman’s influence on the area will disappear and everything will become all green and pretty again. At this point, your job becomes to collect Light Seeds that then appear in the newly purified area so that you can power Elika up and enable her to learn abilities that let her proceed deeper into each main location. Repeat until all of the Fertile Lands are healed, return to the Temple to face the final boss and the game is won.
Honestly, the idea is great and for the most part it does work. If you’re willing to accept the loss of a linear story, then this is an interesting new way to play a Prince of Persia game. The problem though, is that the way that it’s done here takes away a major part of what made the previous three Prince of Persia games so much fun – The environmental puzzles.
In any of the Sands of Time games (even Warrior Within which was easily the worst of the three) you would enter a room, scout things out, climb an object, see if there’s anything nearby that you could jump on to, and continuously think on your feet to try and figure a way out of the room. In this Prince of Persia finding the way out of an area feels more like picking the end of one of three tangled strings and just mindlessly following it. All thinking and skill involved with platforming has been replaced by scratches in the wall that clearly indicate where you should run across, a ridiculously easy timing window that essentially sucks the Prince to where he needs to be, and visual cues that tell you when to use Elika to give you extra distance on your jump.
Combat too, which has never been a very strong suit of the Prince of Perisa franchise, has also been reduced to even more of a mindless mess than before. Rather than pitting you against a bunch of foes and forcing you to use your acrobatics to maneuver around them like the previous games did, Prince of Persia reduces combat to a one on one affair (or two on one if you count Elika). The four face buttons are assigned to four actions: sword attacks, magic attacks, throws, and acrobatics. Each type of attack has a set of combos that generally lead into one of the other’s set of combos.
While there is a lot of variety in the combos and they are very spectacular to watch, the problem with combat is that it is either too long and boring or too short and easy. Basic enemy fights are literally over in 5 seconds because no matter what combo you use, the enemy will generally be pushed to the edge, which will cause the Prince to use an instant kill attack automatically. Then you have boss fights which usually last too long due to the fact that they block like crazy and typically are stuffed with repetitive quick time events. This doesn’t make combat hard or anything due to the fact that you literally cannot die no matter how hard you try. You can only make the battle more drawn out.
The Prince can essentially survive two direct hits from an enemy. After the second one, he will be knocked down and the enemy will go through a scripted animation involving it dealing the finishing blow. A button will then come up on the screen and if you manage to press it in time – which you should due to it being a very large timing window – you’ll kick the enemy away and gain your health back. If you fail the quick time event, no worries, Elika will save you at the cost of the enemy gaining a little bit of health back. Now if combat was as frustrating as it might be in something like… Ninja Gaiden 2, then this might not be such a bad idea for an easier difficulty level. But when combat is already as easy as it is in Prince of Persia, it’s sort of ridiculous.
On the plus side if you were just watching and listening to Prince of Persia as opposed to playing it, then you’d likely be extremely impressed. The game has an absolutely gorgeous art style that looks like a water color painting come to life. As you’d expect from an Ubisoft Montreal game, the animations of the Prince and Elika are fantastic and manage to succeed in making running across walls, climbing along ceilings and swinging across poles fun despite how much the gameplay tries to work against it. Likewise the music is very fitting with the same magical tone and atmosphere that was present in the first and third games of the Sands of Time series.
Overall, I felt pretty disappointed with Prince of Persia. It feels less like a platforming adventure game and more like a series of cleverly disguised quick time events that give the illusion of a platforming adventure game. Still, it’s not an awful or even a bad game by any means as the controls all work well, there are some genuine moments of fun to be had, and really, it’s just such an amazing game to look at in motion.
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