Prince of Persia

The Short


Pros
- Reboot that takes a lot of the core Prince of Persia elements and puts them in an open-world setting
- Looks absolutely beautiful
- Voice acting is superbly done, with both the Prince and Elika portrayed well
- Simplifies gameplay while adding a whole new layer and shift in focus with its platforming
- Music is excellent as well
- Areas you explore are unique, interesting, and (again) absolutely beautiful
- Can't die; instead of forcing a checkpoint reload you just start a section over. Good design choice.
- I liked the ending, ok?

Cons
- Turns into a "collect-a-thon" pretty quickly
- Simplified gameplay elements take a bit of the challenge away
- Script is a bit too "modern" for the characters it portrays
- DLC Epilogue feels like a "Oh yeah, buy the next game"
- One-on-one combat is new and starts decent, but quickly gets annoying. Seriously, cut combat from these games completely. It'll be fine.

New series, new Prince. 

The Long

I've been pretty clear that I loved the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time series of games. They revolutionized the idea of parkour platforming, and were pretty good games to boot. After closing off the Sands of Time trilogy (and before adding The Forgotten Sands into the mix), Ubisoft split off and started making the Assassin's Creed games instead, a sort of weird "spiritual successor" to the Prince of Persia ones. They ended up being so radically different they decided to comeback to the Prince of Persia title in the aptly named reboot: Prince of Persia. Which I will now call Prince of Persia 2008 in some attempt to stave off confusion. Remade with cell-shaded graphics, a new engine (the Assassin's Creed engine, actually), a new batch of heroes and story, and no sands of time at all, can this one really pull of the same magic that The Sands of Time did back in 2004? 

One thing is for sure: this game is gorgeous. 

The story starts off with the Prince (or we assume he's a prince; it never really solidifies he's anything aside from a thief) getting lost in the desert and stumbling upon this hidden civilization. He then meets Elika, a princess whose kingdom has been taken over by a dark presence, and only she can purge the darkness and restore it to its former glory. Also there's like a tree or something that has to be revived in order to keep the darkness from coming back and messing everything up, which would suck. So with Elika at your side you go to the many different areas of this land, purging them clean of darkness through crazy platforming and restoring light to the land. Simple stuff.

It's all pretty straightforward until the ending, which pulls a Final Fantasy X style twist (I might have just spoiled it if you've played that game and not this one. Oops?) and then twists it back in an ending that pissed a whole lot of people off. Personally, I thought it was fine. Without spoiling it, it has your main character (who you are controlling during this) doing something that sort of undermines what you've been doing throughout the game. People thought it didn't work, but I disagree. I felt the character arc of the Prince (similar to the Sands of Time, actually, with him starting as a selfish jerk and slowly warming up to not being a selfish jerk thanks to a girl) made the ending plausible, though I will admit that it (and the "Epilogue" DLC) were probably also conceived so that they could sell you sequels (which are yet to come out). Still, it's a charming story throughout, and the banter between the Prince and Elika is charming and fills the whole "we all know they totally are going to fall for each other" tension that works so well in games like this. 

Plus, they are constantly saving each other, so we all knew it was coming. 

My only complaint is that the dialogue sounds really modern at times. Mostly the Prince's, and that's probably because he's voiced by Nolan North, aka Nathan Drake in the Uncharted games. Nolan North is famous for his snarky, funny characters who don't take anything seriously, and the Prince in this game is pretty much exactly the same as Nathan Drake, except Nathan Drake is probably a murderous psychopath under his cheery exterior. Since you could swap probably 90% of either men's one-liners and they'd still make sense between Prince of Persia 2008 and Uncharted, it's kind of...weird to play this game after playing Uncharted. Well, whatever, it works, but they could have at least tried to make him sound like he was from ancient Persia instead of just off the plane from California.

The core element of traversal is still here, but with some modifications. 

The gameplay has seen a radical change of focus since the Sands of Time games. In those, the game's main goal was to tax your button-pressing ability and timing, punishing you for a slightest misstep but giving you a way out with the time-reversal mechanic. It was challenging and required a lot of trial-and-error until you got into the flow of things, and also meant you had to learn a bunch of button combinations and quick reaction times in order to not screw things up. The ultimate goal was to beat a room and move on, the games being completely linear from start to finish.

Prince of Persia 2008 keeps the cool traversal mechanic, but switches up the goal. Rather than having the goal be "get from here to here and never look back," this game is more open world. After purging an area of darkness, you have to gather mass quantities of little glowing orb seed thingies that are scattered across the environment, usually in the path of some crazy platforming. You have to gather enough of these orbs to unlock new powers, which in turn unlock new areas. You are given around four areas to start, and you are free to tackle them in any order you wish, your only limit being the number of seeds you've collected. This makes the game more of a puzzle game in trying to figure out how to get to certain seeds, rather than a game testing your controller dexterity by throwing impossible rooms at you. It's a good switch up that keeps the familiar and puts it into a completely new system, and I liked it (even if the number of stuff you had to collect was kind of insane).

You're gonna be gathering a lot of these seeds.

Since the focus isn't really on taxing, controller-throwing rooms and instead of seeking out pathways and following them, the actual climbing gameplay has been dumbed-down. This makes sense, giving the change of focus in the game. Rather than force you to hold directions and buttons down least you fall to your demise, each ability is mapped to a button. If it's something that would use your claw (grabbing a ring or a hook, etc.) just tap B when near it and the Prince will run off. Need to wall-run? Tap A while running towards a wall and he'll take care of it. You can still do complex stuff (like jump from wall to wall, or hold B to slide down a wall at a decelerated rate), but as a whole the gameplay is extremely streamlined. This pissed off a lot of people when this game came out, but I think it works better. Had I been forced to collect all those damn seeds and do the super-taxing gameplay from the Sands of Time trilogy, this game would have gotten frustrating really fast. As it stands, it's just tricky enough to keep it challenging, while not going overboard. I think it's a good step in the right direction for where they wanted to take the gameplay, and it all works just fine.

As an additional note: you can't die in this game. At all. If you stupidly fall off a ledge, Elika will warp you back to the last stable ground you were on for another shot. This is another thing people complained about, and to those who did: you are straight up stupid. Seriously, you either are dumb or didn't think this through, because this is a great gameplay choice. First off, there's no loading for this revival; you just pop back and can give it another go. Second, how is this any different than hitting a "Load Checkpoint" screen? It's saving you time to read the text, as well as time to watch a stupid loading screen. Third, as I've said before we have lives in games because of old arcade games. Why shouldn't we be streamlining this? The challenge in Prince of Persia games is doing long sections of platforming (where you never hit the ground) successfully. It's enough of a penalty to be put back on the last stable platform because most of the time that platform is a long ways away. It's just saving you time. If you really hate it, then every time you die and Elika saves you just sit there stupidly for about 30 seconds. This is to represent the loading screen, text "Game Over" and "Reload Checkpoint" screen, and it putting you back to where you were before. Then you can start playing again. Congratulations, you won. Now leave it alone.

This beastie is suffering the Prince to not live. 

Combat has always been a problem in Prince of Persia games, and while this one makes a noble effort to mix it up, in the end it doesn't. Gone are group fights, instead having each battle be just one-on-one fights with powerful enemies. Again, you can't die, but if you go down Elika saves you and the enemies gets most of their life back, so you still have to be careful. Combat is broken up into simple distinct moves like the traversal: a button for sword, a button for grab, and a button to use Elika's magic. You can chain some pretty bananas combos if you know them, but usually you'll just button mash and pray. Counters are also the order of the day (hey, like Assassin's Creed!) though some bosses have unblockable moves that aren't projected as unblockable until after you take the hit, which is cheap. I can see they were kind of trying to make these battles be faster and easier, but honestly I think the game shouldn't have even had them. The platforming was challenge enough (especially near the end, where your timing has to be spot in in order to make it through the more difficult parts) and these battles just drag. Especially the boss fights, where messing up once and going down means having to redo the last 5-10 minutes of a fight. Obnoxious. 

You look cool, boss, but fighting you sucks. 

As you've probably seen from the screenshots, this game is freaking gorgeous. The cell-shaded look really works well and gives it a distinct style, with characters being colorful and well detailed. Perhaps the coolest thing is watching the sort of black/blue of the tainted worlds being transformed into the "Fertile" worlds, where the darkness flakes away like paint leaving luscious greens and browns beneath. It's really something to watch, and if you have a nice HDTV this game really works at showing off how beautiful games can be.

Music is also excellent, with more mellow tunes when compared to the previous Prince of Persia games, setting good ambiance throughout. As stated the voice acting is excellent from top to bottom, with enough of it to keep even the longest climbs entertaining. 

The production values are through the roof. 

If you came off this game from Sands of Time, you might be a little disappointed by the streamlined platforming and change of focus. But after you've been swinging around a bit, collecting the magic glowy seed things and unlocking powers, you'll find there's a lot to love in this reboot. It takes it's roots and does something new and unique with them, which is something gamers are constantly clamoring for (and then complain when people actually do it). It's also a weirdly good game to play with a girlfriend or spouse, because when you are seed-hunting it often helps to have another pair of eyes searching for pathways you might have missed to the more elusive ones. Just a thought.

Even if you never played a Prince of Persia game before, this 2008 reboot is worth looking into. It's fun, relatively non-frustrating (except a few bosses), looks fantastic, sounds fantastic, and lets you do some totally impossible things (like walk on the ceiling. HOW DOES HE DO THAT AND STILL MAKE IT LOOK NATURAL). If this is where the series is going, then I gladly welcome it, and look forward to the next installment.

Assuming they don't take our carefree Prince and turn him into a gritty angry dark shadow of his former self. But hey, who would do that after having such a successful first game?

Five out of five stars. 

I need to Finish the Fight! Where the crap is this game's sequel?