[This review was written while playing the Windows version of the game in Linux under Wine]
On the technical side, Warrior Within has the same small problems
as Sands on Time, but adds some more on top of it. It requires a no-cd
crack to function in Wine and when you up the graphic detail level the
picture ends up being upside down. Playing a bit around with the detail
level and Wine configuration makes things playable, but still leaves a
little upside-down artefact when one slows down the time. But since you
don't run around in slow-mo all the time its completly playable from
start to finish, you however lose quite a bit of graphical detail
compared to Windows.
In terms of story Warriror Within pretty
much is a 180 turn compared to Sands of Time. Where Sands of Time had
depths, athmosphere, Warrior Within is just flat, dark and bloody. The
dialog and story that made the first game interesting, is nearly
completly missing here, the princes dialog is mostly down to a bunch of
*grrrr* and *arrg* sound effects, the skill to say complete sentences
seems to be gone missing in this part of the series. Neatless to say,
this part doesn't really connect much at all to the first one, so if
you are looking for a decent sequel, you won't find it here. On the
positive side, the story features some classic time travel twist,
nothing you haven't seen before, but a little fun in what otherwise is
just a completle failure.
Ignoring all that and focusing on the
game itself, it also has plenty of problems of its own. Unlike Sands of
Time this game features a much more non-linear level design. While your
progress is still linear, the levels allow almost complete
backtracking, this more then once ends up being heavily confusing,
since a wrong turn can easily have you running around in circles for
half an hour. That the game features two time zones and actually
requires backtracking on a regular basis only makes matters worse,
since it gets much harder to figure out if you are actually on the
right path or not. The game does feature a map, but its as useless as
maps can be, since it gives no precise indication where you are, where
you have to go or how you reach it. Its just a undetailed picture with
your character and an X and those don't even get updated after every
change room, so its near impossible to figure out anything from the map
I
also found the fighting system to be pretty terrible. It is often
taughted as one of the good point of the game, but I found the fights
to be overly long and just plain annoying. Not sure if I just didn't
get the combo system or what else might have gone wrong, but it just
wasn't any fun meshing on the same enemies over and over again.
On
the positive side of things some of the jumping and running is still
fun. I however found it to be a little confusing this time around,
distances seem harder to judge and the animation often doesn't seem to
properly fit in, i.e. you have jumps that look like the prince
shouldn't have made them, but you still end up sticking to the ledge.
The locations are much less memorable then those in Sand of Time, but
given how bad most of the rest is thats one of the smaller problems. In
terms of graphics there was one nice level near the end that features
some pretty smoke effects, with smoke getting blown away when you swing
your sword, neat stuff.
Warrior Within also features some
unlockable artwork, but unlike Tomb Raider, its very badly hidden. You
have to find a bunch of tressure cheats that unlock it, but they are
completly randomly places, so you have really no motivation to actually
search for them, you just stumble upon them by accident every now and
then.
Overall the game just wasn't much enjoyable and its probally best to just skip it and ignore it.
