Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

"A breath of fresh air, but not without a few faults."

The last few years has seen an explosion in the number of third person action-adventures being released. Most of them are horrible, simplistic affairs, with clunky controls and a misguided preoccupation with looking 'cool' to the sort of people who worry about how macho their videogames are. I thought Sands of Time was going to be exactly the same. Fortunately, I was (mostly) wrong.

Story

I'll be honest: I skipped the opening cutscenes, so for 95% of the game I had no idea why I was doing what I was doing. From what I can tell, you're the eponymous Prince of Persia, and while accompanying your father's army on an invasion of a neighbouring country you've somehow accidentally turned everyone into zombies. Feeling a bit guilty, you're looking for a magic hourglass to undo everything. None of this really matters.

What is worth mentioning, though, is the subplot about the relationship that develops between the Prince and Farah, the daughter of the maharajah of the country you're invading. She's around for most of the game, sometimes involved in the gameplay, sometimes not, and the conversations between her and the Prince are entertainingly written, rarely corny and - for a videogame - impressively natural-sounding.

Gameplay

The gameplay in Sands of Time basically breaks down into three strands: platforming, fighting and puzzle-solving. The same goes for pretty much every third-person action-adventure released this generation. This game, though, is different. Simply put, the platforming is phenomenal. The Prince is blessed with a variety of extremely acrobatic moves - climbing, swinging, somersaulting, leaping improbable distances and, best of all, wall-running - and controls better than any character I can remember. Everything is breathtakingly fluid, and pretty much every room in the game is set up to demonstrate that. By slowly raising the complexity and scale of each set of obstacles, Ubisoft manages to keep surprising you with the Prince's abilities the whole way through, and makes it feel like his skills are developing alongside your own.

An excellent inclusion is the ability to rewind time by a couple of seconds, so that if you mis-time a jump and plunge to your death you don't have to go through the whole room again. It encourages you to experiment with ever-more daring jumps and runs, and exemplifies the amount of thought that's gone into the platforming side of Sands of Time. It's an exciting, polished and refreshing take on a stale genre.

The puzzles, too, are decent enough. There's nothing particularly taxing in many of the block-pushing and lever-pulling tasks you have to do, but there several occasions where a little more thought is required. Also, there's something strangely satisfying about figuring out what moves to use in what order to find the right route to take through a room. It's that aspect of the puzzle-solving - the part that combines with the platforming - that's most successful, and, thanks to the rewind feature, never frustrating.

Combat, unfortunately, is a bit boring. There's nothing drastically wrong with it - the Prince controls as well when fighting as he does when platforming - but it's all a bit uninspired, despite the inclusion of the now-tired ability to slow down time. There are about six types of enemy, who all do pretty much the same thing and are none too clever, and the game throws them at you from time to time in increasingly large numbers. The Prince's range of moves is fairly limited, and often the simplest way to progress is to button-mash. Given that you have to kill all the enemies in the room to proceed, this makes things very repetitive. You can rewind the action if you make a mistake, just like you can when platforming, but on the whole the combat is more a chore than a pleasure, especially when Farah's involved. God of War this definitely ain't.

Having said all that, the combat hardly ruins the game, which is challenging, interesting and of a good length. Still, I probably won't replay it.

Presentation

Graphically, Sands of Time is solid. The suitably Arab-inspired art style is a nice change from the techno-industrial or fantasy settings of many games in the genre, and is backed up with reasonably high poly counts and detailed textures. There are two small flaws, though. Firstly, the camera tends to get into annoying places during the combat (unlike the platforming, where you can stop what you're doing and move it into a more convenient position). Secondly, the PS2 version has occasional but very noticeable frame-rate issues.

The sound deserves special mention. The Arab-themed music is excellent and, to my inexpert ear at least, quite authentic, despite the occasional onset of electric guitars during fight scenes, and the voice acting is brilliantly sharp. Best of all, the Prince is one of very few videogame characters whose English accent isn't a horribly overdone caricature (take note, Cam Clarke). I found myself quite liking him by the end of the game, which isn't something I can say for the musclebound, moody protagonists of most games in the genre.

Verdict

It's Platinum now, and it's well worth it. If someone can combine the platforming in Sands of Time with the combat in God of War we'll be in for something really special.

8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/31/06