Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

"Excellent Revival to a classic series that's just too short..."

There are certain franchises that I just haven't got around to, even though they've been around for over ten years. It's not intentional. I just don't get around to them. Prince of Persia is one of those series. With it's rebirth in The Sands of Time interest was garnered anew for this quite old series. Let's see if it's worthy of this newfound interest.

Don't trust a dog that's already betrayed it's master

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time tells the story of….the….Prince of Persia. He's the character that you control and he's never referred to as anything but Prince, so there you go. On a trip to a foreign country, the Prince and his father invade the country controlled by the Muharahjah (spelled something like that). They invade to get the great treasures that are there according to his traitorous Vizier. Two of those treasures are the Dagger of Time and the titular Sands of Time. This invasion acts as our tutorial mission for the game. And what we get is something that we don't often get anymore….a real platformer. These days, real platformers are few and far between. Sure, we get the occasional action game with platforming elements, but in PoP the real enemy is the environment. The tutorial mission guides you through the basics, teaching you things like jumps and wall runs. As the game progresses, you'll be swinging on polls, balancing on beams, jumping from column to column, and swinging from ropes. Enemies will exist between all this jumping around, but make no mistake, they're not the real danger.

At the end of the tutorial stage, you have the sands of time, and you head on over to the destination country. In order to show off the sands of time, the Vizier has the Prince put the dagger in the sands of time. And all hell breaks loose. Now the Prince travels through the castle with Farah, a woman captured at the attack in the Muharajah's palace in order to seal the Sands of Time again.

Just a little sand in your shorts, right

Upon releasing the Sands of Time, everyone except for the Prince, Farah, and the Vizier was turned into a sand creature. These aren't the most reasonable of beings, as you might imagine, and they provide your opposition for the game. Which brings us to The Sands of Time's slightly unique battle system. You see, in The Sands of Time, in general, it doesn't matter how long you beat on the enemy, they are not going to die. Hack and slash all you want, it's not going to make a bit of a difference. In order to kill enemies, you have to use the Dagger of Time. This little dagger is responsible for many things in the game, but the important part here is that stabbing these sand creatures with the Dagger of Time will kill them and collect sand from them. Of course, they're not just going to let you hit them with it. You generally have to knock them down in order to open their defenses enough to land the finishing blow. This slightly different take on combat is quite refreshing. It's not all about damage, it's about landing that finishing blow. Of course, combat isn't perfect, which makes sense as it's not the focus of the game. The controls tend to lag a bit behind the action of all the prince's fancy moves. While you never really lose control, it takes some time for your “b” button press to lead to an actual attack many times.

But what of this sand that you collect from the enemies? This is perhaps the most important aspect in the entire game, and is the titular “character” in the game, the Sands of Time. As the game progresses, the Prince will gain more and more time manipulation powers for his dagger. But it starts with perhaps the most important one, Recall. Recall rewinds time, and this becomes an all important element in the game. You see, sometimes mistakes happen. In combat, and in swinging from rooftop to rooftop. Generally these lead to either a very unhealthy hero, or a dead hero. And this is where recall comes in. Mess up? Rewind! Fall to your doom? Rewind! Take one sword stab too many? Rewind! Mind you, if this was limitless, it'd lead to a very broken game, so some limiting measures have been put in place, namely, the collection of sand from enemies. You can only use one rewind per sand tank you have. As you progress through the game, you'll find piles of sand that you can use to gain new sand tanks. You then have to fill these tanks with the sand from enemies. This system of rewinding is vastly important. The game would be considerably more annoying if after messing up one jump you had to repeat large portions of the game. Especially when you consider how trial and error many of these areas are. It just makes life simpler.

There are other powers as well, but these are generally far less important and are regulated to combat for usefulness. They also run on a separate set of tanks called power tanks which you get by defeating enemies but are limited to the number of Sand Tanks you have. This is quite helpful, as once again, combat is the lesser of the two evils you'll face.

A Diamond in the Rough?

While those are the basics of gameplay, Prince of Persia does so many little things right. The Story is well-told and intriguing, and while there are only two characters, the interaction between them is fun and entertaining. The game also saw fit to through in visions of the future at every save point. This is very helpful in figuring out where to go next. This may seem obvious, but when your main mode of transportation is flag poles, walls, and beams, it's quite helpful.

But there's a few things that hold it from greatness. Firstly, as mentioned previously, the combat could use some work. It can feel unresponsive at times. Secondly, it's short. REALLY Short. Even with my hanging around and doing nothing at times, My timer maxed out at ten hours. This is compounded by the third problem, a complete lack of replay value. While it's certainly neat to leap over buildings in acrobatic feats and while figuring out what to do next is quite an interesting dilemma, it's one that passes after you've done it once. Once you know how to get by an area, there's really nothing left to challenge you or keep your interest. I suppose if you ignored the game for a long time and forgot everything you could replay it, but really, there's nothing there.

Summary

Pros

+++Excellent Platforming Action
+++Excellent Presentation
++ Unique Combat System
++ Good Storyline and Character interaction

Cons

---Combat leaves a little to be desired
---Quite Short
-- Basically no replay value

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time stands as an excellent revival to a classic series. It has many solid aspects and is presented excellently. Unfortunately, it's short length and absence of replay value means this is a rental. A definite rental (as in, if you haven't played it by the time you read this review, rent it now), but still a rental.

7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/23/07