Rating: 9/10
Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft
Website: http://www.prince-of-persia.com/
Review By: Daniel Chambers
Tip: Hover your cursor over the pictures to see what they are all about. Click on the pictures to enlarge them.
The Prince of Persia (PoP) line of games has dated back to the times of side-scrolling action games. Obviously this game marks another huge leap in the Prince's graphics and gameplay, and boy, does it deliver in both respects.
In this episode our dashing young prince, desperate to impress his father, gets himself a nice, shiny Dagger of Time with which he gets conned into releasing the evil Sands of Time by a plotting sorcerer (Aladdin, anyone?). Of course, because our Prince is kind and heroic he realises he must capture the Sands of Time and replace them back into the hourglass whence they came.
Of course, every good story has to have a bit of romance, and keeping with tradition, there is a Princess in PoP. The Princess seems to know a lot about the Sands of Time, and guides the Prince through the steps of retrieving the sand. She also provides some comical relief with banter with the Prince in the story.
PoP has you viewing the Prince from a 3rd person view. This works pretty well throughout the entire game and only at a few times the camera can get stuck or irritating.
The camera system is very well rounded, and works very well considering the levels are not designed to be very forgiving to a 3rd person camera. Depending on the area you can control the camera, spinning it around the Prince. Sometimes through, the area is very unforgiving to the free spinning camera, so the game locks it into a certain position which is the best position from which to view the action.
Since many of the levels require you to figure out how to bounce the Prince around, swinging, jumping, and generally doing insane stunts, the camera supports some other nifty and useful features. You can zoom the camera right out so that it views the entire area from far away so you can see everything, or you can view the area from the Prince's eyes, which is useful in tight areas. Unfortunately you cannot move the Prince while viewing from this aspect, because as soon as you move, the view returns to 3rd person.
Movement of the Prince is all from the keyboard. You use WASD to move, and a combination of moving, right-clicking and pressing spacebar to perform the Prince's many stunts. Unfortunately WASD moves the Prince in relation to the direction the camera is facing. So if the camera turns 90 degrees to the left while you are pressing W to move forward, suddenly the Prince will turn right. This only happens sometimes so I think it may be a bug. This can get irritating, but luckily it doesn't happen often and you get used to dealing will the small changes.
The various stunts the Prince can pull off to get you from A to B are many. He can run along walls, swing on bars and ropes and pull off amazing acrobatics. These are quite easy to do using the controls, so there is not a very steep learning curve in this respect. At the beginning of the game it tells you how to do the stunts to help you learn.
Fighting is a very large part of PoP and it is done with an amazing style and grace. The Prince is armed with a sword, the Dagger of Time, and his amazing agility. He can vault over enemies, perform jumps off walls to power stabs and many other stunts to get him by all the hordes of sand creatures that want to dispose of him. The Dagger of Time has many powers, one of which is rewinding time (which I will talk about in the next paragraph), but others can be used to help you take on the many, many, many sand creatures that attack. Some of the powers include freezing the enemy in time so that you can destroy him without resistance, and a mega-freeze that freezes everybody so you can 'appear' in front of them and slash them into oblivion. If you do not use the dagger's powers then you must smash the enemy to the ground and 'retrieve' him using the dagger. If you do not, he will get up and continue fighting. As the game progresses you get better and better swords that block, break enemy blocks and damage better.
A major feature of PoP is that the Dagger of Time gives you the ability to rewind back time. This means that if you mess up while doing stunts and fall to your death you can quickly rewind time and the Prince moves in slow motion backwards through what he just did until you decide to stop or the Dagger runs out of rewinding time. You can use this ability anywhere and it is extremely useful in a fight as it allows you to rewind and get out of the way or block blows that you didn't see coming.
The Princess plays a beefy part in PoP, as she provides comical banter with the Prince and can help in fights. Some of the 'fights' they get into (between the Prince and the Princess) are genuinely funny, and are not just lame arse jokes. The Princess fights in battles with her trusty bow, although I find her to be more of a hindrance than a help (I suppose that is the point), because she gets attacked and you have to save her before she dies. She sometimes misses with her bow and accidentally shoots you instead of the enemy, which she apologises for.
She also comments when you do things, for example when you rewind time she says 'That's funny... I feel like I have lived this moment before...'.
The graphics are very well done in PoP. The attention to detail in the levels are amazing, although some parts are a little repetitive. The game takes you through many different environments, bedrooms, barracks, baths, ancient foundations, etc and all are very nicely done. I played it on a GeForce4 Ti4200 card and it played fine. Only when the camera passed directly through some particles, such as a cloud of sand or dust, was a slow-down noticed. With the resolution set lower, I also managed to play it successfully on a GeForceFX 5200Go.
The whole game seems to have a smoky haze over it making things a little blurry (look at the pictures and you should notice), but I think this is the intended effect, considering the Prince is actually telling a story, and there is lots of sand flying around. I personally would prefer it to be sharp but otherwise its quite okay.
The in-game movies are well done, but I found the characters in the movies, especially the Princess, to be skinnier than in the real game.
The sound is mostly okay, some of the sounds, however, are a little dodgy, for example when an entire stone bridge falls away it sounds like a bunch of wooden blocks falling over.
The voice acting, on the whole, is very well done except when the Prince and Princess say the word 'bath'. Throughout the game they speak in an posh almost upper-class English accent, until they say 'bath'. They say bath in an American way, with the 'ath' in 'bath' sounding like the 'ath' in 'athletics'. It sounds dodgy, to say the least.
The music in PoP is very good. As you probably know, music gives atmosphere to the game, and here it (or the lack of it) does very well. There is no music in PoP when you are not fighting. As soon as you start fighting, the music starts. It suits the game very well and adds a very 'Persian' atmosphere.
The movement animation in the game is extremely good. All the movements of the Prince are smooth and realistic, whether he is walking, wading through water, balancing on a ledge or swinging on a pole. Unfortunately the lip-syncing is a little dodgy and at some points, nonexistent.
The physics are good, although they are nothing as good as the Karma or HAVOC physics engines could do. Curtains fold realistically are you walk through them, ropes swing nicely, etc. The physics is probably on par with the physics found in Splinter Cell.