Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: Play by Play *Completed*

Instead of starting up a very different kind of game this time, I decided to stay in the same geographical area, gameplay style, and even publisher as the last game, which was Assassin's Creed. 2003's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is, of course, quite a bit older than Assassin's Creed and more based in fantasy than history. Still, I have heard very good things about it (even the curmudgeon game reviewer Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw likes it), so I thought I'd give it a go.


Somewhat in preparation for this game, and somewhat because I was tired and wanted to watch an dumb action movie, I watched the 2010 film of the same name last night. It was a pretty bad movie, but I won't let my opinion of it cloud my ability to enjoy the game.

So far, I have put in just over an hour into the game. I made it through the tutorial and am part way through the first palace area. I kind of like the idea that the game is a story being told to the player by the Prince himself. I'm not usually a fan of narration, but this is self-aware enough to be enjoyable, like when you accidentally make the Prince fall to his death and he pops in to say, "That didn't happen."

The story so far seems very simple. Basically, the Persians attack a city to find its treasure, find a magical dagger, and release the Sands of Time, which makes buildings crumble and sand zombies (I guess that's what I'd call them) to pop up everywhere. I suppose the old platformer games of the franchise also had little in the way of story, but I still would have liked to see a bit more interesting setup.

Making up for the lack of story, though is some pretty fun gameplay. The jumping and climbing mechanics work fairly well, and will probably get better as I get more used to the game. It's not as pure parkour as I had been lead to believe, but I suppose Assassin's Creed was one of the first ones to really pull that off. This is much more linear and limited, along similar lines as Tomb Raider games, although I must say I can already tell this game is much better than Tomb Raider: Legend in most respects, and that came out three years later. The combat is also fun and smooth, which is a welcome change from what I was doing in Assassin's Creed. All I have to worry about is attacking and dodging, which the Prince executes with graceful acrobatics. I feel like the combat system of Batman: Arkham Asylum may have been inspired by this.

There are only a couple negatives to the gameplay so far. One, which is very minor, is that after each battle, I get a few-second animation of the Prince sheathing his sword. It was old the second time I saw it. The other problem is with the camera. Most of the time, I have a decent amount of control over it, but there are also a bunch of times where it won't point the right direction, refuses to move at all, or automatically switches viewpoints. Sometimes, as stuck camera means I have the Prince hanging from a rod, unable to turn around because Up and Right both mean slide to the left and Down and Left both mean slide to the right. When the camera automatically switches its view, that means whatever direction key you were holding is now the opposite; when I run around a corner, I don't want to suddenly see the Prince from the front and immediately run the opposite direction. I'm pretty sure there's a secret society of video game camera operators that really hate gamers.

I have not played many games from 2003. From the list I went through, it looks like the only one I made it all the way through was Knights of the Old Republic, but I have also played a bit of Jedi Academy. Given that limited context, it would seem that the graphics of Prince of Persia were pretty good for their time. They actually still hold up pretty well because of the slightly-cartoony, brightly-colored style of the game. Everything looks pretty nice. The only problem I ran into was not being able to see anything but a shadow at first. Evidently turning on Fog in the options screen produces an ugly brown fog that covers nearly 100% of the screen. I assume this is some kind of bug, but it was easy enough to deal with by turning off the fog.

So, my first impressions of this game are pretty good. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.

I have reached the first boss, and I'll just say that it is enormously difficult. Way more difficult than any fight thus far.

After consulting a walkthough, I got a few tips with which to beat that first boss. I'm not sure first bosses should be that difficult.

Otherwise, the fights after that have been challenging, but not as difficult.

The puzzles, on the other hand, are generally not very challenging or difficult. I hope some of the solutions become less obvious in the future. Really, the only thing that really makes the puzzles difficult now is the uncooperative camera. When the camera is mouse-controlled, it's nice when it is completely mouse-controlled. It's really pretty limited here, and not dying is much easier to accomplish when everything can be seen.

And regarding the puzzle areas, as fun as they are to run and jump around in, they are really absurd. Whoever designed the security system for this palace needs to be fired, because I'm pretty sure it would hamper the movements of the residents just as much as those of intruders. Unless, of course, every person in the palace was an Olympic-level acrobat.

I would like to take a brief moment to talk to you about Farah, the sidekick in this game. With few exceptions (like the Half-Life games), I would prefer to not have sidekicks in single-player games. They often make things harder to deal with simply because an NPC is very limited. I would prefer to go solo or have cooperative gameplay.

At least she's easy on the eyes.

I really hope Farah ends up being important to the story, because she sure isn't doing much for the gameplay. In combat, she has a bow, but does not seem to accomplish much with it. Occasionally, she even hits the Prince if he is anywhere between her and the enemy. For the puzzle sections, she assists, but in extremely contrived ways. The puzzles only ever have one solution, and sometimes that means waiting for her to climb through a crack to step on a pressure plate so the Prince can get to the next part. The puzzles are literally built specifically so she would have something to do. A puzzle requiring two players would make sense in a co-op situation, but it seems pointless with an NPC.

And now, a word on the combat.


The fights in this game tend to be pretty challenging. Not only am I one man (and a bow-woman, I guess, but she hardly accomplishes anything) against a multitude of monsters, but the enemies can also teleport.

In some ways, I enjoy the challenge. Having to pay close attention to everything and be careful about timing really pulls me into what's going on. It's when I'm getting surrounded and beat into the ground or just mashing buttons to try to duplicate a wall rebound attack that the challenge becomes much more frustrating than enjoyable.

Often what turns the tide from enjoying the challenge to being very frustrated is the length of the battles. Theoretically, they could go on indefinitely because of the kill mechanic, which is actually pretty unique. The Prince can hack and slash the monsters all day with his sword, but the only way to actually finish them off is to use a magic dagger to absorb the mystical sand of which they are made. It gets a little repetitive to fight nearly every enemy in that manner, but it is more interesting than straight-up sword fights. But, since I use the dagger, the fights don't go on forever. They do last a long time, though, because the enemies come in waves. You clear a room, but right away you hear the wooshing sound of teleporting sand creatures. It just gets to the point where I want to end so there's less risk that I'll die and have to start it all over again.

Have you ever had a roommate who constantly forgot his keys? I have two of them. One came back as I was about to see the ending cinematic of this game. I left to let him in and then reloaded the game, thinking it wouldn't be a big deal since there was a save point immediately before the cut scene. For some reason, reloading skips ahead to a point after key story elements. I was able to finish that last battle and check YouTube to see what I missed, but save points are just kind of oddly spaced in this game. Sometimes they are unnecessarily close to each other and other times, they are annoyingly far apart.

But I don't have to worry about that anymore, because I beat the game.

It was an okay game. The story was decent, although I forgot what the end goal was halfway through. The gameplay was alright, although half of it was difficult due to poor design than because of being actually challenging.

To end on a positive note, though, the scenery was quite nice, and despite the whole thing taking place essentially in the same building, the architecture remains interesting. The score was also pretty good; an interesting mix of Persian and rock influences.

Overall, this game was probably more frustrating than fun. I prefer games that value a good story and a fun time greater than ones that takes lots and lots of practice to get good at.