Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

"Largely overhyped."

I found this game unused for 5€ in a bargain bin recently and, seeing all the great feedback it received, decided to go for it. Even at this price I feel ripped off.

I tried to like it, I really did, but this game is just full of frustrating factors and lack in redeeming qualities.

The Good

On the good side, the production values are still pretty nice even three years later. The graphics still hold their own today, the prince is beautifully animated and the soundtrack is excellent. He is also quite easy to control and you will pull off all sorts of nifty moves with ease.
Save points are cleverly placed and loading times are non-existent.

Needless to say, with all these good elements you can't help but get a great first impression upon starting up. But you'll soon realize that the meat wrapped inside these cute bells and whistles is nothing but dull and frustrating.

The Bad

Basically you could divide the game in two: the "puzzle" parts and the combat parts. Combat is tedious. While the nice moves you can pull off look amazing at first, it is quickly apparent that there aren't many of them and they get old really fast. There is next to no strategy, you just need to use a certain attack against a certain enemy. The catch is that once an opponent is knocked off, you HAVE to finish him off using the dagger of time or else he just wakes up. Of course, while you do that, you can be hit. To add insult to injury, it is also often hard to aim at the opponent on the ground when the screen is crowded (especially if you don't have a gamepad) and you often end up using your dagger on someone else while the unconscious enemy is being revived. All that makes for really boring and dull battles.

The puzzle parts are either real puzzles, or areas in which you have to figure out how to get from point A to B using your acrobatic skills. Either way, the puzzles themselves are extremely easy, or at least they would be if you didn't spend all your time battling the game for control of the camera. You can nearly never get a good point of view of where to go next, and when you try to adjust it and make the camera run into an obstacle, instead of trying to avoid said obstacle the game just puts the camera back where it wants it to be.

The puzzles aren't the only thing to be hampered by camera problems. The game lets you zoom in or out on your character as you wish while standing still, but as soon as you try to move it goes back to right behind your character. In combat, the camera often teleports itself behind or inside the same pylons or trees that it so refused to even touch during puzzles, making it impossible to see what the hell you're doing.

*insert end of overused movie title here*

The story really is nothing too special. In fact it justifies much of the traps you will find on your way with one huge plot hole about 20% into the game: you activate the palace's defense system, made of emerging spikes, moving saws and rotating blades. All that in order to stop enemies THAT CAN TELEPORT. That's right, the only persons in the whole palace to whom these traps can be dangerous are YOU AND YOUR SIDEKICK/LOVE AFFAIR. Apart from that the story is nicely narrated but there's nothing close to resembling a twist.

Also a small nitpick would be that, while the soundtrack and voice acting are pretty good, the sounds are pretty awful. The sounds of things such as swords clashing or huge engines being put in motion would have really needed to be toned up a notch or twenty.

Overall there's not much to justify the 10 hours that this game requires. I would only recommend it to masochistic people.

(let's rate it like gamespot:)

Gameplay - 2
Graphics - 5
Sound - 1
Value - 0
Tilt - 2

OVERALL - 2

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 02/02/07