Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

"A flawed but heavily enjoyable experience"

Living up to a game as innovative as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a tough thing to do, but I believe Ubisoft has pulled it off quite well. This sequel has fixed several gameplay issues of its predecessor and even added many new factors that we had all inwardly wished for while playing SoT. Unfortunately, the game seems to actually regress in a few areas, which we will address later.

PRESENTATION
Visuals - The graphics in this game aren't mind blowing, but they are an improvement upon SoT. The cut scenes are the only slight wow-factor here, since now each character has an uncanny air of realism about them, rather then the somewhat cartoonish looking ones of SoT. In game, the same concept has been applied, and it doesn't work as well. The prince and Shadhee (the black-clad female you'll meet early on) look fairly good with the added realism, but unfortunately, the main female throughout the game, Kaileena, can look stupid at times. Whereas Farah, although somewhat unrealistic in her facial structure and... curves, looked great, Kaileena has Angelina-Jolie lips and over exaggerated breasts. In game, they just look like skin covered melons. I can't really stand it when they try to hard to put unneeded emphasis on the hotness of a female in games, so this would actually make me smirk during some cutscenes.

The environments seem to have dissapointed some, but I didn't really notice much loss of grandeur. Unlike SoT, you won't be seeing an extreme display of elegance in each room you enter, but each general area of the castle has its own unique style. Also, throughout much of this game you'll be switching between the present - where everything is extremely dilapidated, overgrown, and some barriers that would usually block you have fallen, and the past -where everything maintains all the detailed elegance (or ugliness) of the SoT palace, and where some barriers that might have fallen over the course of time to block you in the present are still intact and out of the way. The only true change they've made is that now you'll encounter several more dark, murky, and generally unpleasant environments.

I give the visuals a 9 out of 10.

Sound (effects/voices) - Several of the battle noises have been rehashed from the old game, but hell, that doesn't change the fact that they're superb. Unfortunately, though, now when you're fighting enemies, both the prince and the enemies speak. Now, this wouldn't matter if Ubisoft would've prepared many more then 10 little voice clips for each enemy and around the same for the prince, but alas, you won't even have to play far into the game to hear the same war cries to the point of a little annoyance. But that's not nearly as bad as a particular boss fight in which I heard my enemy repeat the same little assortment of phrases every 5 seconds.

The voice acting in the game is fair, and the most of the enemies do sound threatening. Well, aside from the pibsqueak skull-headed guys you meet really early, but you don't fight them that often after the opening of the game, so their crappy little imp voices (which are crappy mainly because they're trying to be serious) don't ever get in the way. Unfortunately, you have to fight some dominatrix-type female ninjas whose voices are just... bad. First off, the voices aren't even integrated in the game, like that of normal enemies, so instead of hearing a cry that seems like its somewhat distant and echoes a bit, you just hear a voice coming directly out of your speakers, right at you. Second off, the lines and the voice that reads them sound like they're from a C-rate porno. I hope you won't have any parents nearby to hear: "Hit me prince... hit me HARDER!" "There's... soooo much pleasure in plain" "Can't we... work this out?"

And now, sadly, the cream of the crap... the music. I had high hopes for the music as I played through the opening. I heard a few generally Arabian tunes and even a really cool, very dark piano/light drums kind of thing. Then, as I got further, I even heard some distorted guitars! At first I thought "This is new! And it doesn't sound all that bad..." but then the little track looped. And looped. And looped. And looped. Get my point? In more then a few areas of the game, the "intense action music" was simply one out of I think 3 guitar tracks, each 20-30 seconds long, that would just loop over and over. Why one of the tracks is just the riff from a Godsmack song from the early 00's is beyond me.

The sound gets a 6 out of 10 points.

GAMEPLAY
Combat - Easily the most improved factor of all. In SoT, let's face it, combat was more often then not a joke. Just vault the red enemies, wall-rebound the blue enemies, and memorize the opportune moment to strike for anything else. By about halfway through the game, I found myself dreading enemies because all it meant was a bunch of droll repetition focused around enemies who, in some fights, seemed to never end. Thankfully, in WW, this has been fixed and made better then fighting in a lot of 3rd person action games.

Change 1: Dual weapons + single weapon combat: Your main weapon, which is upgraded more then a few times throughout the game, sticks with you, of course, but now you can pick up a large variety of subweapons, the four main categories being swords, axes, maces, and daggers. Although their main usage will be to string together insane combos, they can also be thrown for knockdowns or delightful decapitations.

If you find yourself without a sub weapon, triangle allows you to grapple an enemy and land behind him, somewhat like the vault move, but once you're in the air 4 new possibilites open. You can grab him from behind, do a backwards tumble and throw him away, (usually off of a cliff) or catch his neck with your blade from behind for an easy decap, or strangle him to death, (and simultaneously use him as a human shield) or if they're weak, steal their weapon and kill them with it.

Change 2: Combos. In SoT, the amount of fighting you could do on foot alone was somewhat limited, but here it has been heavily expanded. These combos are fairly simple and revolve around tapping square and triangle in different sequences, but the results can be pretty sweet if you know what you're doing. The enemies are aggressive enough to stop it from being a button mashing fest, as well.

Change 3: Vaulting over an enemy ('stepping' on top of him and leaping into the air to twist around and attack him from behind) is no longer boring. It has almost as many secondary choices as the grapple function, so you won't find yourself doing the same damn little slice 40 times in a row.

Change 4: Easier battles. Let's face it, in SoT we all didn't feel like beating down endlessly on unmercifully respawning sand zombies that DIDN'T LET YOU PASS THE AREA until you had fought and killed all 20 of them. Now, rather then presenting you with an unescapable battle at the beginning of each area, you're allowed to pass up enemies altogether if you wish, but the fun of the new battle system always stopped me from that.

Change 5: Fatalities. Now, rather then seeing the same animation for every kill, there are more then a few ways to slice and dice your enemies with awesome finishing moves.

Platforming/traps - Still great, thankfully! It's mostly the same as the last game, but now you may have to go through the same platforming puzzle a few times. Fortunately, it doesn't ever really get old for some reason or another. They've also added two new elements: banner desending and rope climbing - but this time the ropes are up against walls. They've taken away the free swinging ropes of SoT, but they were never really that great, so it doesn't matter much. The traps are also much tougher in some areas, which is good considering the often simple traps of SoT.

New factor - Open environment. Now you can head back to most areas of the castle that you have visited before, sometimes to search for secrets and others for the story's sake. This is much better then the extremely linear-feeling of SoT, where once you finished an area, you were done for good and there was no way back.

I give the gameplay another 9/10.

STORY/MOTIVATION
I'm actually not going to elaborate, you should really see the game for yourself, but I will tell you this: its more complex then SoT. There are now several twists in the story rather then only one, and the whole thing carries a tone that is much more sophisticated then "save the world!" It's definitely enough to motivate you to complete the game.

The prince has left his N'Sync persona for a much more grim, grisly character. Of course, this means his voice is manlier and he now has a lot of facial hair. I'll admit that I liked this character more then the one from SoT, but honestly, he doesn't develop enough for his tough-guy personality to be justified. Fortunately, he becomes a little more interesting later on in the game, I'll leave you to see how.

The best part of all - TWO ENDINGS! Wowzers!

The story gets an 8/10.

I know that this all shouldn't add up to an 8/10 because of the sound, but I think the amazing gameplay was enough override to bring the scrore up.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/12/05