The newest installment in the Prince of Persia series is a totally new game from the old trilogy that started with the Sands of Time so long ago. I’ve played through that trilogy several times and enjoyed it thoroughly, but this is something totally different. To start, our hero is not a Prince and there is no relation with Persia at all. But we do have a Princess and a world to save from the darkness.
First and foremost I think the graphic style actually stands out in this game. The old games changed quite a bit style wise from each other, but they were all in the vain of being realistic. This game though creates more of a realistic cell-shaded look. I consider it fairly similar to Dragon Quest (in comparison to something like Viewtiful Joe cel-shading), but being as the characters aren’t meant to look realistic (instead of Dragon Quest’s Anime style) it comes off with much more detail.
The environments are the most gorgeous part of it though and the detail put into changing the darkness areas into the healed areas is absolutely fantastic. I can’t say as much for the characters though. Although they look great when traversing the world, getting up close on them for their dialogue exchanges you see that they are a bit wonky looking.
The game plays pretty true to the PoP series with all kinds of platforming exploration. However, this game does it in a fairly different fashion. The way I think of it is that it takes away the free-form exploration and more so gives you a cool path to travel on. The game really doesn’t like you to try and go wherever you want; this is one of the things that bothered me the most actually.
When exploring the old games you could kind of climb on anything in the world if you could figure out a way to get there. However, this game has the “save” system instead of the sands where Elika will simply save you every time you mess up. The problem is, the game determines when you mess up sometimes immediately when you jump, instead of after you’ve fallen into nothingness. So in many cases, when trying to get somewhere, I found her saving me when I had already landed on another platform therefore not allowing me to access that platform from that way.
That’s probabaly my biggest complaint about the game to be honest, because it takes away all the freedom and non-linearity. The game isn’t totally linear though, as it gives you an entire world of places that need healed (Okami style) and you can pretty much explore them in any fashion. It’s up to you what order you want to collect the Powers in to unlock the new areas, but you will have to collect a lot of light orbs along the way.
Speaking of the light orbs and powers, I want to touch on both real quick. There are 1001 Light Orbs in the game, you will be forced to get 540 of them to get all powers. I collected them all, but it wasn’t exactly fun. The fact that you have to spend time collecting them also isn’t fun because it really takes away from your focus of playing the game to just do mindless collecting. I wish they hadn’t forced you to get so many.
The powers are a problem to I think. They seem like that was the only way they could think to stop you from accessing certain areas because 2 of the 4 powers require no input from you. You simply get on the power plate and press a button and then you are flown to another area. The other 2 require a little move left/right input. But I think they could have been a bit more creative than this.
Now, I think this came off as complaining quite a bit which I didn’t mean to do. I enjoyed the game a lot as an experience. I didn’t like the ending, but the platforming elements were solid, the new additions to the PoP series platforming normals were good (roof-running, the rings). I’m getting tired of saving the world from “darkness” and a lot of the dialogue came off as awkward. As an experience I think this was fantastic, it was something that tried to be different. However, in trying to be artistic and visionary, the gameplay suffered and there’s no way around it.
Final word, I think this would have benefited from being a new series instead of a Prince of Persia game since it’s completely unrelated to the others, but it’s a pretty worthwhile play compared to a lot of the other junk that got released in the fall.
