Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

[zelghadis]

In 2003 Ubisoft (back then it still wasn't one of the most hated companies in the industry) decided to take a brave step - restart one of the most popular classic franchises in PC market - Prince of Persia, the classic platformer back from 1989, which has been one of the first great hits in PC gaming history.

But while games in 1989 were very simplistic, we now had 2003 - noone would look for simple platformer. So Ubisoft decided to make a totally new game - with new story, lore, mechanics - it didn't have much in common with original PoPs. But well - it's still quite fun to play :)

The story is quite good, yet a little bit childish. This time our prince got a partner - bewautiful (at least in cutscenes ;p) princess who can shoot bow like a freaking Robin Hood ;p The story starts as we attack our 'partner' kingdom with a Persian Army - while soldiers storm the gates, our Prince in search for glory climbs the city walls and goes for a solo quest to access Maharaja treasure and get fame and gory. In treasure room he finds magical dagger that can bend time - he is then tricked by evil Vesir into using it on Hourglass containing magical Sands of Time - while sands are set free they change all the people in the palace (ofc excluding our hero, princess and evil Vesir, how convienent, isn't it? ;P) into Sand Monsters, undead persian version of a zombies ;p, and the only way to stop them is using our magical dagger.

Like in every PoP game movement animations are awesome. This game is already 10 years old, and still character moves as well as in many modern titles. You run across the wals, jump into every direction imaginable, fight with a sword, make piruets with it etc. And it all looks very nice even today. While models may not live up to today standards, they're still enjoyable due to their cartoony character.

Music is great as well - while we move through the corridors we hear our surrounding with light middle-east inspired ambient, and when we jump into a fight music changes into nice energetic guitar songs.

Well, as we're at fight - let's talk about one thing I didn't enjoy in the game - fighting system. There's a lot of quite a longish fights with multiple enemies, and they're getting pretty boring quite soon. While animations are great, our movement and combo list is fairly limited and after performing same jump/hit movement which seems to deal the best damage for few minutes it gets irritating. While developers clearly wanted to implement brawlery/slashery combat, they obviously didn't have much experience with it. So we're getting boring and repetitive GoW clone with very limited number of movements - while it may look nice - it is not challenging and pretty boring.

Ofc there's also bright sides - SoT introduce a lot of time based mechanics (like slow motion, freezing enemies etc) which are a lot of fun, but sadly we are limited to use them only few times before our power bar wears off.

The platformig is top-notch. The unbelieveable evolutions we're performing are very satisfying. Nearly every room and a corridor is a new platforming puzzle - and well, just look at any youtube video of PoP:SoT cause it's really hard to describe with words how good and fun all this running, climbing, wallrunning jumping and time-bending is, especially when it's all mentioned above combined :)

The bad thing is that game is definetely too short! while Warrior Within took me ~12-13hours to beat, SoT is only ~8-9hours long. While it's not a little compared to some modern games, it's still leaves a unsatisfied feeling.

To summarize - if you're into good adventure-platformer PoP:SoT even if quite old now is still a great choice :>

Pros:
Great animation that lives even to today standards.
Awesome top-notch platforming.
Great music.
Great variety of traps and different mechanisms we're faced in platforming sections.

Cons:
A little childish storyline.
Fighting gets boring pretty soon.
In-game models doesn't live up to today standards.
Game could be a little longer.

[1000mg_Ginseng]

I do remember this being fun, and i have it on steam. I'm just going to have to DL it now and get started playing it! Thanks for the nice review Zel!