Prince of Persia

"short and sweet"

Graphics 9/10

Graphics of this game is quite good, its cell shaded but not too much that it ends up being too cartoonish.
Some of the textures in game are a bit confusing, what I mean is that sometimes I jump to something that looks like a wall covered in vine but it's not.

Sound

The usual, nothing exceptional, nothing annoying. Sound works well and you would most likely have nothing to complain about

Story

Short but sweet, just pay attention to the occasional cut scenes and listen to the chatter that both elika and the prince make and there will be no way you will miss the story (more under gameplay)


Gameplay

the game is actually free roaming, you can choose which part of the map you want to explore the only limitation is that you need certain powers to get to certain maps, but this is no big hindrance, this simply means you need to finish one section of the map at a time until you can unlock all the powers and after that, it's completely free roaming. There is no chapter 1 chapter 2 and so on, there is only the need to do a certain objective over and over on each map, once you've done all of that you get the ending

It's nice to see that you can usually go to point a to point b and back to point a with ease which isn't usually the case with previous PoPs. The problem with this is that the good part of previous PoPs of figuring how to get from point a to point b is almost gone. and to make things worse they made areas were you need to do a wall run have some form of trail or worn out tracks as if hundreds of people with the ability to wall run have gone back and forth and few hundred times on them already, again this simply takes out the fun in figuring out how to get from point a to point b. also they included a guidance system that helps you plot a course and help you get from one place to the other which incidentally also points out the walls, the rings, the poles, etc that you need to step on to get to a place. In previous PoPs every room was a mini puzzle just begging you to figure out how to get from point a to point b, walls that you did not even think you can wall run on, in this game that is easily not the case


Elika

She is the equivalent of the dagger of time; if you fall she picks you up and places you back on the last stable ground you were on. If you are about to get killed she blows away your opponent but restores some of their health. She does this indefinitely even if she looks like she can't do it. What this means is that... yup you are immortal, worse case is that you could take forever to kill an opponent if you rely on her too much without damaging your opponent enough.

After thinking about it for a while I really think the dagger is better, with elika you sometimes need to go back all the way back to the beginning when you were on stable ground. Sometimes you need to scale walls and stuff for about 15 or more seconds, if you fail in the 14th second and miss a jump you need to do it all over again instead of just rewinding a few seconds to correct your mistake.

Combat

As stated a while ago, you are immortal, you just need to figure out how to damage your opponent or eliminate them before you have a need to have help from elika too many times to the point that they are fully healed. the enemy usually throw a shield that makes them invulnerable except for a certain attack, this isn't too difficult to counter act anyway as the required attack can easily be used after a parry that is easy enough to learn to do effectively. The enemies will occasionally do certain animations or grabs that will require you to do button presses in order to stop, much like the god of war mini-game. If you fail this mini-game it will bring you closer to, if not to elika needing to save you and give the enemy life.



Puzzles

of course the game has puzzles but the puzzles in this game mainly involve turning cranks, turning one usually turns more than one object which easily complicates things, needless to say, I was only able to solve about 3 easy ones, the rest I needed to use video guides to solve. There are not that many puzzles thankfully

Ending

So far I haven't seen anyone on the message board hate the ending, the ending is cool I don't want to spoil this aside from telling you that there is only one ending.


Final notes

If you liked the old PoPs then you might be a bit disappointed as this is a dumbed down version of the game, more like a beginner's prince of persia. this game is mostly for the story which will probably be part of another trilogy. I suggest you play this game on a console where you can just rent it. As it has no replay value and can also be completed in just a few hours

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/26/08

Game Release: Prince of Persia (US, 12/02/08)