PS3/360 Review: Prince of Persia
by Rangebar Merani on January 13, 2009 at 12:27 pm
After playing Assassin’s Creed last year and playing Prince of Persia: Sands of Time a few years back, I was pretty stoked about playing the latest installment of the Prince of Persia series. Sadly, I was stoked only until I actually played the game because it wasn’t as good as I thought it would be.
The newest Prince of Persia is a totally different game than the Prince of Persia: Sand of Time, Warrior Within, and The Two Thrones trilogy. Hell, even the Prince is different — he’s a total douche in this game and quite annoying when he talks (voiced by the actor from Uncharted, actually). The story starts off with the Prince searching for his donkey when he suddenly bumps into a girl, Elika, running away from some guards. He eventually pursues Elika and saves her from the guards and her father, the King, who has destroyed the Tree of Life and released the evil god, Ahriman.
Once the Prince finds out that Elika is a Princess and on a mission to stop her father and Ahriman from corrupting the lands with evil, the Prince decides to help her. Elika explains that she and the Prince must reach and heal the multiple fertile grounds in the area in order to give the tree of life power once again, imprisoning Ahriman. Obviously, the story goes on but any more about it and I’d be spoiling it for you.
The gameplay is quite similar to the past Prince games, with tons of wall-running and acrobatic moves, but this time there aren’t distinct levels, but an actual free-roaming, open world. In this new Prince of Persia, players aren’t just flying through the level wall-running and jumping to the next part, but must actually take their time to find their way from one point to another, which worked well with the open world. This is actually one of the best things about the game, but was also one of the game’s miscues.
I think the open world was a great idea, but it seemed to me like the developers over at Ubisoft Montreal wanted to make the game much longer than it had to be because they had an open world. This led to many repetitive missions, going from healing one fertile land to another, and continuing this same process. To me this became really boring, but at least the combat somewhat made up for it.
The combat system in the game definitely made up for some of the repetition in the open world. Unlike the hordes of enemies and button-mashing combat from the previous Prince games, the combat in this new Prince of Persia is set to 1-on-1 at all times and has a slower pace, using guard breaks and a combo system to add strategic elements. The combat also boasts some pretty nice attacks with aerial attacks and drawn out combos, leading to some great cinematic presentations with stunning finishing moves.
Although the combat may be better in this game, the acrobatic and aerial movements are no match to that of last-gen’s Prince. Most of the time the movements actually feel like they are on autopilot, seeming more like a scripted animation. The previous Prince of Persia games had smooth and quick gameplay elements, focusing on players skillfully executing aerial movements to continue on, whereas this new Prince really slowed the pace down and made the player think with different sorts of puzzles and contraptions to work with to proceed.
Oh, and did I mention you can’t die in this game? Yep, your new girlfriend Elika has all these strange powers and with them she keeps you from dying, whether it be falling to your death, being swallowed up by the evil corruption, or just being stabbed by a baddie. This part kind of reminds me of Sands of Time when you used the Dagger of Time to stop and go back in time and keep yourself from dying. Not being able to die isn’t necessarily a bad thing because essentially it’s just a restart point, and if you die, you’d restart anyway.
Graphically, the game is gorgeous, and I love the new direction of the art style Ubisoft Montreal went with. The Prince, Elika, and all other characters in the game are extremely detailed and the open world is just stunning. The graphics are definitely one of the game’s finer points.
Prince of Persia has been overly hyped and highly praised, but I really don’t see why. The game is repetitive, pretty easy, way too long and, well, kind of boring. But with all the bad there’s still some good in this game, just not enough. I’d say it’s a rental rather than a buy — have fun with it for a few hours, then return it… unless you like it more than I did.
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3 Comments » |
on January 14, 2009 7:15 am
Yeah, uh, thanks for not giving this game a 9 or above like certain other video game review sites did. This game maybe deserves a 7 because of how pretty it is but that is the only reason imo. I played it for about 5 hours, explored, picked up light seed after light seed, killed weak enemy after weak enemy. How can you have a video game where you cannot die!?
Ultimately, the game had to come out of the box before I finished it. So boring!!! Traded towards Fallout3 (Great move)
Sorry, didn’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade who was thinking about getting this game but really unless you are into exploring, this game should be a rental only!
on August 4, 2009 2:47 pm
this game sucked i mean good grapics but you cant die
on October 26, 2009 9:05 pm
I heard this game was insanely easy, glad to see you knocked a few points off when compared to other sites. It looks amazing, but again, most seemed to think it was a let down compared to the others. great review, definitely well thought out.