Prince of Persia: A review and retrospective

The Prince of Persia games have been around at least as long as I’ve been alive. I can remember playing the first entry in the series when I was in second grade. But for all its seeming longevity, it hasn’t always been brilliant. In fact, the last game in this series I remember having any fun with was Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which came out four years ago.  Sands of Time was perfect. It had well developed characters (for a video game, anyway) tight, responsive controls, engaging gameplay, and bright, colorful, well designed environments that would’ve induced an eye popping orgasm in even the snobbiest of architects. (Okay, maybe I’m being a bit hyperbolic with that last one, but still, awesome environments.) But then they had to screw it all up in the sequels.

 

 How, you ask? Well, it seems someone at Ubisoft (The Prince of Persia series’ developer) had decided that “emo” culture was what all them crazy kids were about nowadays. So, in the first sequel to Sands of Time, PoP: The Warrior Within, the tone of the series was changed to match that. Gone was the lush coloring of the environments, replaced with a drab palette of greens, browns, and grays. The prince himself (up until now an arrogant, slightly conceited, but still likeable person) became a whiny, sullen ass, simmering with focus-tested “attitude” and generic bad-boy rage. The gameplay was still very good, but very few people could stand the abhorrent mishmash of death metal clichés and high school drama club dialog long enough to figure that out. It’s like taking a delicious chicken sandwich and spreading a big dollop of pus all over it. One could argue all day that it was still essentially the same sandwich, with all the same ingredients, but now no one is going to eat it because you spread pus all over it! What in God’s name were you thinking? Thankfully, after the critical drubbing that this new, “edgier” take on the series received, the emo crap was toned way down for the next sequel, PoP: The Two Thrones. Apart from a couple of ill advised chariot racing sequences and an attempt by the developers to shoe horn the prince’s previous whiny goth persona into the game in the form of a “Dark Prince” that the player changed into during certain levels, Two Thrones was largely a return to form. Still, something felt off. It was like a close friend who’d turned into a pod person. All the things you like about him are there on the surface, but he’s acting just weird enough that you don’t know if he’s there to hang out or implant his spores in your luscious human brain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So it was with some reservation that I popped Prince of Persia, the latest and most blessedly subtitle free game in the series, into my PS3. Thankfully, I had a lot of fun with this one. The graphics are amazing. The whole environment looks like a painting rendered in 3D. I’ve included a screenshot that I think shows this off in a good way, but it really deserves to be seen in motion. But how’s the gameplay, you ask? I think it’s great, if a bit repetitive in places. The main object of the game is to clear the land of a mystical “corruption” brought on by the release of the dark god Ahriman into the world by an insane king. The player accomplishes this goal by running, jumping and climbing through ruined castles and towers festooned with traps and pitfalls. Your goal in each of these obstacle courses is to reach a mystically charged “fertile ground” where a spell can be cast to drive back Ahriman’s influence and purify that part of the land. These obstacle course segments make up the largest and most enjoyable portion of the game. It’s an awesome sensation to run vertically along a stone wall just barely ahead of a swarm of evil insects, and then from there to leap into the open air, grabbing hold of a steel pole jutting from the opposite wall and doing a triple front flip onto a platform. Not everything in the game is perfect, though. For instance, there are only four major enemies that you fight throughout the game, and the combat is repetitive and overly focused on precise timing. Many times I failed because I didn’t press exactly the right button at exactly the right time, and that can get very frustrating. Also, the game can devolve into a giant fetch quest at times. For instance, when the player reaches the end of a level and purifies it, little mystical orbs called light seeds are released. It then becomes necessary to collect a certain number of them before you can move on to the next area. This felt to me like an artificial way to pad out the length of the game, and I found it annoying. Nonetheless, I think Ubisoft has redeemed the series with this game. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a fun way to blow 12-16 hours.