Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

"Good story and gameplay"

Picture a beautiful Arabian princess apathetically living her life as a figurehead responsible for nothing more than looking elegant. She holds up well, a band bunching her long, silky, black hair into a ponytail. Her body moves seductively across the screen, supporting her soft, thin face, complete with high cheekbones. Her whole aura emits the middle-eastern, Arabian flavor as her clothes barely cover her body. Her midriff glares at you at all times, skin-tight pants extenuate her shapely legs. Farrah. Even her name signifies Arabia.

Her residence lies in the legendary land of Arabia where brown sand cover every inch, where crows savagely circle dying animals, where motley buildings appear more often than regular homes, where the very crisp air radiates puzzling aromas of homemade perfume and baked bread. The sun blasts down on everything, baking the ground to a cracked concrete hardness, shirts stick to the backs of people as if they just came from a pool. The howling wind whips the sand off the ground, forming dry, brown tornadoes. Everything is quiet except for a few birds squawking at each other as they huddle over food, desperate to replenish the fluids lost from the heat.

Prince of Persia takes place in this sultry Middle Eastern setting where a teenage prince must travel back in time to destroy a dagger and warn Farrah of the perils she's destined to face. This astronomical feat, able to warp the very existence of time, resides inside of a dagger. Only Prince possesses it, causing great jealousy among power hungry individuals, but in particular a councilman, who's supposed to protect and advise Farrah. In order to warn Farrah, Prince traverses an obscene amount of castle landscape starting from a battle-trod walkway area that leads to Farrah's castle and ultimately concluding hundreds of feet in the air.

The castles defend themselves from intruders by incorporating various traps; including swinging spikes, spikes shooting from the floor, gigantic rooms where the exits lie either below or far over your head, among others. These traps were intended to quell the advances of enemies, but a miscommunication unleashes the traps on the hero instead. You should feel grateful as these traps provide exhilarating opportunities to stylishly dodge and weave around them. Prince of Persia's play style gives you athletic freedom to not simply jump over a gap, but hunch your body and stylishly gallop along the wall to reach the other side. Instead of simply hopping up to reach the escape, you run sideways along a wall to gain speed and height, then acrobatically launch onto a trapeze. After swinging on the horizontal bar, you then must time your jump off the trapeze, maximizing height and distance to reach an even higher level. Effortlessly run straight up a wall, as if the wall was solid ground, latch onto the edge of the escape hole and pull yourself up. Stand back. Admire your work, as you'll feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment realizing you've just completed a physically impossible task with just two legs. Throughout the entire game, Prince of Persia 2 propels you to maneuver out of dangerous situations, each situation giving a thrilling flair.

What allows the acrobatic jumps and twists rest in the creativity of the castle's designs and surrounding minutia. Each platform and pole used to travel through a room is well placed; the solution to a predicament seems the only solution. Somehow, Prince of Persia manages to weave simple platforms and ledges into the massive environments, yielding a constant “search-and-feel” sensation. Progressing through the levels is like climbing a mountain, both literally and figuratively, as you'll desperately look for something to grab onto while traversing the many castle areas. Indeed, while holding onto a tiny rock protruding from a cave ceiling while suspended hundreds of feet in the air, you must probe everywhere for the slightest foothold or ledge to continue. While perched in the air, you'll feel disoriented since the next area seems impossible to reach. Ubisoft's level design always manages to reveal the next move in the smallest degree of showmanship, such that the solution will slowly dawn on you. In this case, the next move has you jumping onto another tiny rock protruding from the ceiling in a chain sequence, but the rocks mesh beautifully with the cave backgrounds, giving the impression these awkward looking rocks were there for many, many summer Arabian nights.

Accomplishing such acrobatic feats remains easy with Prince of Persia's control scheme. In fact, utilizing just a few buttons, you'll never confuse actions together; Prince glides along the screen performing trickery, without a hint of ambiguity. Though at times certain actions bear a small “safety net” for errors. These “safety nets” push the theatrical element of the title slightly over the fighting and jumping, creating smooth movements for prince. It's akin to acting in a well-choreographed movie. When first grabbing a trapeze, your body realistically wiggles then increases into a wild bucking back-n-forth motion to gain momentum so you can quickly rotate around the pole. This provides an excellent jumping platform, but the game doesn't give full freedom. When you push the button at the apex of an upward swing you'll execute a leap, yet when you mistime it, Prince will only jerk the swing to a stop. Prince should jump whenever you jump. If you end up missing the target and fall perilously to the Arabic spikes, then so be it. Otherwise, it feels cheesy when the perfect jump is nearly guaranteed. On another note, if you do miscalculate a jump, and fall towards a spike, Prince of Persia implements an ingenious recovery system with the use of the dagger. Instead of starting all over from a save point, you can rewind the event (in glorious real-time) to just before the error and continue. Brilliant, it looks flawless, and it fits the Arabian story-telling perfectly.

On your dagger destroying, rock climbing journey through the Arabian citadels, you'll encounter human soldiers that have sadly morphed into walking zombies whose sole intention is to kill. To defeat them, you must attack, but again Prince of Persia attacks these foes with acrobatic flair. A sword rests in the hands of Prince that stabs or swipes an enemy as part of a combo or other such dramatic assail. The fighting system performs with excitement as enemies rush at you from all angles, with varying power and speed. And its very pleasurable fighting 3,4,5 enemies at once. You'll often slash one enemy's midsection, then barrel roll into another to perform an uppercut slash, back flip while sweeping another, all as part of one long exciting sequence. Although, attacking looks cool onscreen, it'll quickly lose its charm as you progress through the game. You'll only need a basic 3 hit combo that seems quite capable of taking out most of the enemies, and the tough ones will perish with one of the special attacks. Perhaps intentional to appeal to a wider audience, this game also utilizes a too-powerful blocking system for their attacks nullifying any sense of strategy. You won't need any Arabian genie bottles against any of their attacks because you can always rely on the block; plus blocking doesn't even stagger the Prince, you can sit in one spot and block forever without suffering any damage.

To make things even easier, the elusive and much sought after dagger empowers the hero with a wealth of cool looking special powers. They operate with the same theatrical flair as the rest of the game, though fighting such thin enemies hardly requires the ability to freeze or slow them down to a crawl. If the dagger couldn't rewind time or kill an enemy by taking its soul, then the dagger would be completely useless.

With all the folk tales associated with Arabia, the land holds a mystical quality to it. Prince of Persia succeeds in capturing that wonderful aura by weaving certain elements into the atmosphere, like booby trapped dungeons, black crows swarming around, magical sand, etc. Thankfully, Prince of Persia never becomes cliche. Prince of Persia maintains a believability quality that makes you follow along intently. In a strange deja-vu manner Prince relates the story in the present tense, as if you're hovering over the action, but the action occurs in the future. This enables the Prince to warn Farrah of the backstabbing ways of her councilman, since he's already experienced it. Its just as convoluted as it sounds(especially since Farrah is helping you throughout), and only the ending movie will clear it up.

Belly dancing women gyrating their body to drums, cobra snakes swaying as they stare in their master's eyes, tan skinned warriors riding camels: whatever image you associate with Arabia, Prince of Persia has it. Even the audio blends in. In a satisfying audio move, silence creeps to the forefront when you're calculating which ledge or pole to use. The only sound you'll here are tiny pebbles tumbling from the wall as you navigate the thin mountain edges or the blistering wind swirling around. Couple that with outstanding graphics and you have the complete aesthetic experience. Slim fighting slightly mars the experience, but the narrative and excellent trap dodging more than makes up for it. Ubisoft's sense of style wins the day as they have created a great action adventure game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/05/04