Ubisoft has done an excellent job of handling the Prince of Persia franchise over the past five years. First,
we got 2003's Sands of Time, an excellent game that was also fun to play, and then there were the two
sequels, Warrior Within and Two Thrones, rounding out a trilogy that could be described as one of the best in
gaming since the turn of the century.

Now, we get a new Prince of Persia, here in 2008 for the Xbox 360 and PS3. It promises to be a new Prince
almost across the board, but does it hold up against the sublime Sands of Time? Well...



Trying not to compare this Prince to Sands of Time is impossible. The two games are fundamentally
different, but here's the biggest difference: Jordan Mechner, the original creator of Prince of Persia back in
the day on PC's, was in on Sands of Time. I think he was working on the eponymous movie, because this
new beast doesn't truly feel like Prince of Persia.

As expected, you play as the Prince, who isn't even one at the start of the game. He's just a vagabond who
is coming back from an adventure with his donkey laden with gold and other treasures. However, a
sandstorm kicks up and leads the Prince down a path that ends with him meeting his femme fatale
companion (voiced by Kari Wahlgren), Elika. The Prince decides to help Elika bring the world out of
darkness, which was wrought by the evil wizard Ahriman. Not a lot is there for story, but there is
compensation in the interaction between Elika and the Prince, which can make for some good and well-
written dialogue.

Problems start with the Prince, however. While Elika is well-voiced and Wahlgren is a name trusted in anime
voice-over circles (she was Robin in Witch Hunter Robin and Haruko in FLCL), the Prince sounds
more like Nathan Drake from Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, one-liners and all. The Prince's dialogue has
about as many one-liners as Batman & Robin, and I can't believe I'm referencing that awful movie.

Getting away from the story and into the graphics, the game is a looker. Cel-shading has been a popular
technique for gaming for many years now, and while I still think the Dreamcast's 2000 masterpiece Jet
Grind Radio still does it the best, Prince of Persia does an excellent job with its graphics. While the game
can sometimes go darker than dark in many places (the darkness-afflicted areas, of course), the game is
simply beautiful when lands are restored, and seeing a land become restored for the first time is truly a sight
to see.



All these good things come to an end, however, when you run into the gameplay. It is afflicted with "casual
gamer syndrome," as I like to call it. The game basically holds your hand throughout the entire affair, and as
a Prince of Persia veteran, this was a pill that felt more like a suppository.

As you play, you'll see a few things wrong with the game, if you're a Prince veteran, but let's take a look at
some of the good things. Elika is not like Tails in Sonic games and makes herself scarce while you run
around and look badass running and jumping off walls and onto pillars and everything like that. She is also
useful for combat, as you can call on her magic with the press of a button to create some truly sick combos.
The streamlined combat interface is also nice, making for some easy quick combos, but it gets too easy to
spam one combo and use it over and over again.

That's about it for the good stuff. The rest of it is too damn easy. As I said before, the game holds your hand
throughout the entire experience. First of all, you can't die. Ever. Not once. Elika will always be there to
save you. On paper, this is a good idea, especially if you make a mistake while platforming, like pressing the
wrong button or moving in the wrong direction, Elika will carry you back to the last piece of solid ground.

However, while this could have been forgivable if it was just limited to a certain amount of uses like in Sands
of Time, it extends to combat, where it all falls apart. If you get critically injured, Elika will save you, nurse you
back to health, and your enemy will also regain his strength. Horrible idea. Knowing that you can't die takes
all the tension and all the drama out of combat.


Dammit, Elika! Can't you let me die?

Other problems with gameplay are that it's just too easy. The game is a cakewalk from beginning to end, and
the game tells you what to do. There is freedom to tackle the game however you want, beating stages in
your own order like in Mega Man, but getting there is enough to put you to sleep because there is barely any
combat to be had.

Most of the game's focus is on the platforming, which is what made Prince of Persia great in the first place,
but there is so much mandatory backtracking to do and so little combat mixed in that the game becomes a
bore. You need to go back into healed areas because if you don't, Elika won't learn new spells that are
required to get into more areas to heal. Collecting Light Seeds is the crux of the game, and getting all 1001 of
them requires you to go out of your way, make impossible jumps, and make you wish that there was more
combat than one person every 90 minutes or so.

Hillary Goldstein on IGN said that "the longer you hold onto Sands of Time, the harder it will be to accept this
new Prince." It's hard enough to accept a neutered Prince with enough one-liners to patch hell a mile, but
when the trademark difficulty is gone and there's no way to change it, that makes the game annoying. Some
truly awful design decisions by Ubisoft also cursed this game into a 3 out of 5.[size=12][/size]