So let's start off with the obvious good points.
This game is fabulously beautiful. This is quite possibly the best
collaboration between the artistic and technical side of game visual
development ever displayed in a game. The colors are excellent, the
level design is fabulous, and the sheer size and scope of everything
constantly amazes and never gets old. Add in the fact that the visuals
in this game have their own particular style and the game is just
amazing to look at as a whole.
I've heard a lot of complaints about the new prince, but he isn't all
that bad. He reminds me of Han Solo. Anybody that played through
Warrior Within and dealt with the groan inducing teen angst of that
Prince should have nothing to complain about with this one.
The characters are deep, especially Elika, and they're enjoyable and interesting to travel through the game with.
However, there are some really terrible elements in this game that make it the single worst installment of the franchise yet.
Combat is awful. I mean spectacularly awful. The camera is fixed and
often sits behind columns and the pillar of light from the fertile
grounds during boss fights, leaving you unable to see anything at all
except the gorgeous texture of the pillar itself while you get your
butt whipped. There are various quick time events a la God of War, but
many of them are pop up and vanish so quickly that you literally have
no chance to succeed with them unless you've fought the same boss
multiple times and know when they are going to come up, making it
worthless to even have the button presses in the first place.
Every is ragging on the fact that you can't die at all, but it's not
that bad. Especially not in the platforming aspect of the game. The bad
part about platforming here is that it's all very watered down. Gone
are there "Hmm, where am I supposed to go now?" elements of the
previous Prince of Persia games. All it takes in this one is a quick
press of the Y button and Elika shows you exactly where to go. I would
prefer a good map and the means to navigate it by myself.
The fact that you can't die in platforming is just a checkpoint system,
and it's way overblown as a negative point. That being said, it would
be nice for Elika to have had some sort of gauge on her magic so that
you could only die a certain number of times. Ubisoft would have
greatly benefited by having multiple difficulty levels. Easy, where
Elika's magic is unlimited and you have her compass. Normal, with the
map and a limited magic meter. Hard, also with the map, but an
extremely limited amount of Elika's magic.
As for combat, it's the same -- Elika will save you literally hundreds
of times through combat alone when the camera is constantly thwarting
you and throughout the various impossible QTEs.
I had the most fun in this game traveling from point to point, healing
the lands, and experiencing the character growth between the Prince and
Elika. What I did not enjoy, however, was Ubisoft's cheap attempt to
lengthen the game by requiring us to collect the light orbs. I feel
taken as a fool when I see things like this in games. It feels very
much like Ubisoft realized that the game was way too short if they just
gave Elika the abilities after finishing one of the four bosses, so
they tacked this on. It's incredibly boring and drove me more than one
time to turn the game off after finishing a boss, and turning instead
to Fable 2 or Valkyria Chronicles. I ended up dragging myself back to
this game several times in order to get the bare minimum number of
light orbs by backtracking through previously conquered areas.
It would have been nice to see Ubisoft instead have a very limited
number of orbs reside in extremely hard to reach places instead, and
leaving achievements/trophies for how many the user could collect.
Gameplay lengthening through a cheap tactic like this is never
appreciated, and it's one of my main pet peeves with the video game
industry right now.
One minor note that is impossible not mention. Turning the cranks. I
frequently found myself dropping huge strings of curses at the
impossibility to consistently press the right button to turn a crank. I
would rotate the joystick in the direction that I wanted the Prince and
Elika to turn the crank, and it was about a 50/50 chance that the crank
would actually turn that way. This left me absolutely dumbfounded, as
the same exact cranks have been in the Prince of Persia series since
Sands of Time, and have worked with the joystick since then, yet using
the joystick in this game to operate them is basically left to chance
that you will actually turn it the right way.
All in all this game is very average. The platforming is fun but lacks
the depth of the previous games. The combat is absolutely awful and is
far and away the worst of all of the Prince of Persia games, which is
really saying something since the worst part of Sands of Time was the
combat.
In conclusion, it's starting to look like die-hard fans of the Sands of
Time game will never get a similar experience again... Myself included.
