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Many game series are trapped by their own history; vocal fans of classic titles take exception when what is considered canon has been deviated from, despite if much of those qualities were born more of technical limitations than creativity at its finest.  For this reason Prince of Persia is refreshing in that it looks at the game series as a mythology, with some basic cornerstone elements, that can be reinterpreted and reexamined to find new ways of presenting the familiar.  Unfortunately, it also is a game that moved out of its comfort zone into something new that never quite coalesces into a fresh identity.  PoP is a group of interesting ideas searching for a stronger game to hold them all together.

A Whole New World

The story and characters are all new and feels more like proper mythology than the previous games.  You play a young, cocksure adventurer who has just lost his donkey and all the gold on it when you come upon a woman in distress.  This young woman, Elika, is a princess of a kingdom that has been slowly falling apart due to an encroaching evil that, upon your arrival, is released and it is upon you to help banish this corruption.  With little back story or context greater than the matter at hand you are thrown into an immense world that was once great and has fallen into a depopulated decay.

It’s this world that’s the real star of PoP.  The game is nothing short of stunning with strange architecture that changes from region to region but retains a singular style.  The team behind the game wanted to achieve the energy of the concept art drawings in the game itself and on this point they succeed many times over.  The environments feel simultaneously hand-drawn and very physically present in the world using color pallets that jump off the screen.  Perhaps even more remarkable are the animations that have a fluidity of early Disney work where the in-betweens articulated a sumptuous attention to detail. 

The art direction in Prince of Persia offers moments of awe that continue throughout the game and are made all the more amazing by being seamlessly interconnected in a single game world devoid of load times.  This technical achievement stands apart from the game as something worthy of great praise.  Unfortunately, it also serves to highlight the limited experience for the player within it.

1,001 Platforming Nights

The game is structured very differently from the previous Prince of Persia games.  After a rather brief introductory sequence that introduces the gameplay basics the entire gamespace opens up to the player.  You must, with Elika at your side, find particular points within the world where Elika, using magic she only recently acquired and cannot explain, must banish the corruption and return it to it’s former beauty.  Your journey to these locations requires the remarkable physical agility found in the previous three PoP games.  You’ll run along cliff walls, jumping back and forth avoiding outgrowths of corruption and attempting to time everything perfectly to watch the deeply satisfying animations make you look far more awesome than the simple button presses would imply. 

Not that the series hasn’t always been about an economic use of the controller and here a new skill is available.  A hand-claw allows the player to slowly slide down cliff surfaces and becomes useful in combat.  Here the simplicity is more a result of the game moving away from the environmental puzzles of the previous three games to more straightforward platforming.  Rarely is it unclear where to go next (Elika also helps guide you to your destination) and it feels less like manipulating the environment around you with your skill set than traversing the environment and it’s convenient crevices, rings and vines because you are the only one who can.

The biggest challenge in the platforming sequences is an issue that has plagued the game series in the past, the controls are not always as reliable as you would like them to be. In what seems to be a mixture of camera placement and control stick sensitivity, launching oneself off the wall when intending to run along it happens with frequency among other instances of unintended consequence. This issue is mitigated in large part by Elika who will grab you from your death fall and return you to a nearby point.  This is accomplished with a quick cut scene and minimal time lost.  I cannot help but wonder, though, if the decision to prevent “death” was included, in some part, to offset the quirky controls.  This isn’t much of an issue outside of the fact that linking together the movements across the environments is quite pleasurable, even relaxing and the moments when you lose control and can’t figure out why can prove jarringly annoying.

The move towards traditional platforming gameplay isn’t at the heart of the game’s simplicity.  That blame resides with Price of Persia’s open-world structure that flat lines the challenge and difficulty on a median.  The world is separated into four distinct regions, each of which has four arrears to cleanse of corruption which opens up a boss arena.  Once an individual area has been freed of evil you go and collect glowing orbs that littler the landscape and provide new platforming challenges.  These orbs are the currency that unlocks powers, such as climbing quickly and flying on rails, which are activated only at specific points in levels and are essential for completion.  All of the powers are available at the same time so how you progress through the game is determined solely by the order in which you choose your powers and the game.  As a result you don’t really grow in the game and the game doesn’t change with you to provide greater challenge as your skills as a player improve.  It’s interesting to experience a game lacking in a difficulty curve but ultimately it begins to feel empty and deliberate as your satisfaction in success declines.

New Fighting, Old Dance

The combat in the game makes for a far smaller portion of the experience than one might expect and it too suffers from the same sense of deliberate design as the platforming.  Each of the four regions has a boss, a prominent citizen of the world now corrupt and mad, and you will encounter the same boss five times in each region along with two to three encounters with lower level enemies on your way to each boss fight.  While there is an attempt to scale the challenge of the enemies somewhat as you progress through the game, there is a point where it seems that the game has shown you all the tricks up its sleeve in terms of presenting a new challenge.

The combat itself is interesting.  This Prince of Persia focuses solely on one-on-one combat that, in the case of some of the Boss Battles, can lead to some drawn out battles. While you don’t possess the free agility as you do in the platforming sequences there is a nice roster of combos to perform that, when executed correctly, are very attractive.  I found that the game was somewhat capricious in when combos and blocks worked and when they didn’t.  Failure (and success sometimes) manifests itself in a series of quicktime sequences that can prove very, very quick and sometimes went unnoticed due to the remarkable amount of visual activity on the screen.  On the whole though, the combat, like the rest of the game, begins as fun and intriguing and soon becomes weighed down with predictability and process.

The compartmentalized structure of the game also hurts the storytelling as instances of narrative need to occur in any order and as a result character development is at a minimum and only really gets interesting in a couple of sequences.  Once again the end result was a lack of concern or interest, although in the case of our cocky and flirtatious lead character that never seem to have a moment of self realization, it moved into annoyance.

Formerly Known As…

Prince of Persia is a disappointment because the game has a lot going for it but all in disparate element that don’t feel fully fleshed out and don’t blend together despite the amazing visual splendor that wraps it all up.  I was initially intrigued by its visual innovation and I believe many will want to check the game for that reason alone and I cannot dissuade anyone from doing so.  Just be forewarned that the promise at the beginning will, at best, be fulfilled in the sequel.

Article By: Adam Sessler