Prince of Persia

December 11,2008 - The Prince is back and he’s changed a lot in the past few years. Ubisoft is back with a new Prince of Persia adventure that looks and feels a bit different than when you last saw him during the Sands of Time trilogy. It seems that the developers have taken this game in an interesting new direction, but does it succeed or fail?

This Prince of Persia has little connection to the Sands of Time trilogy, mostly because Ubisoft Montreal has taken a Legend of Zelda approach and create a new Prince and a new world to explore. This time, the Prince is a bit less serious and a bit more willing to throw out one-liners and jokes to lighten the mood at times, which is a bit of a surprise when compared to the brooding and serious prince we’ve played with for years. That doesn’t mean this new Prince is bad either. He runs into a princess named Elika at the beginning of the game and ends up helping her fight back the awakening of the evil god Ahriman, who has essentially choked the life out of this kingdom and corrupted the lands. You’re tasked with helping Elika heal the land and restore this kingdom back to its former beauty and helping the Prince find his lost donkey that is carrying loads of gold, which is nostalgically called Farah.

Like many games this generation, Prince of Persia has embraced the open world genre to open up the gameplay a bit. Once you get through the opening part of the game, you’re open to explore the kingdom at your leisure, which consists of 24 total main areas split up between four overall areas that are ruled by four of Ahriman’s minions. You’re able to easily reach the four entry areas to where these minions rule, but you need to collect light seeds to be able to open up more areas to progress through the game. The main downside to the open world structure is that when you have enough light seeds to activate some new areas, you need to travel all the way back to the main base, which gets tedious when it takes 10 minutes or so to get back. Luckily, you only have to do that four times and you can unlock them in ways to help you heal all six areas controlled by a minion.

The platforming of Prince of Persia has been enhanced greatly and given a much bigger focus for this next-gen iteration of the series. Using a much more polished version of the Assassin’s Creed engine, the wall-running, wall-climbing, and jumps are better than they were in Assassin’s Creed, which you may recall as require jumps to be nearly perfect while you’re given more leeway here for precision. The presence of Elika as your partner has be taken to the extreme as she acts as a moving checkpoint when you make bad jump, so you never fall to your death, but are taken back to the last platform you were on. That unfortunately means that some of the long or complex stretches of wall-running and other acts of acrobatics can be a bit aggravating when you make a mistake. The open world aspect also brings about a GPS-style navigation set-up where you can set your destination on the map and Elika can send a light to show you the way, though it occasionally acts up when you take a slightly different way than it suggests which causes it to suggest that you go back and use its recommended path.

The tedious combat of the Sands of Time trilogy has been taken to heart as Ubisoft Montreal’s influence by Shadow of the Colossus greatly shows up in how combat is handled. Instead of fighting loads of bad guys while platforming your way to bosses, the combat encounters are kept to a minimum with one-on-one fights being the only fights in the game. This keeps the decent combat mechanic from being an annoyance along with the ability to avoid fights with quick reflexes or to knock the bad guy off the platform for a quick defeat. The boss fights can get a little tedious once you’ve fought the same boss several times without much changing between each fight, which is still a good alternative to what’s been done in the Sands of Time trilogy. The combat itself is nicely-handled with the use of Elika, a throw button, a dodge button, and a main attack button, which are used to counter bosses who can go into rage modes that can only be countered with a specific move.

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