Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is an action-adventure with heavy focus on acrobatic platforming. It was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, and was released for the PC, XBOX, GameCube and Playstation 2 back in 2003. At the beginning of the game, the titular Prince makes a horrible mistake and unleashes the (also titular) Sands of Time upon the world. The game follows the Prince and the Indian princess Farah on their quest to undo the Prince’s mistake.
Prince of Persia’s biggest draw is the acrobatics, and rightfully so. The acrobatic moves are very cinematic — you’ll swing between bars above spike-filled gaps, wall-run between rickety platforms and walk along crumbling ledges hundreds of feet up in the air – and it never gets old. Thankfully, the Prince’s moves are not only visually pleasing, but also fun to execute – the controls are as tight as they could be and should you die, you have only yourself to blame.
Dying isn’t really a problem though, thanks to the game’s time-control features. Using the Sands of Time the Prince can rewind, slow down and freeze time. The rewind power comes in handy when you accidentally fall off a cliff or get impaled by an enemy’s sword, and saves you a lot of frustration. While you only have a limited amount of “charges” you’ll constantly find new sand, and unless you deliberately jump to your death you should have more than enough to stay away from the Game Over screen.
If you can get past the fact that the game’s graphics obviously don’t compare to those of current-gen games, Prince of Persia looks great. The environments really are believable — which is impressive considering that they also are designed to work for acrobatics — and add a great deal to the immersion. Both acrobatics and combat look amazing thanks to fluid animations that flow into one another. The music could have been more varied, but the few tunes that are there sound great and help create a fantastic storybook atmosphere.
While the combat looks incredible, it has several issues. For example, the button for dodging is also used for acrobatic attacks, and if you’re surrounded by a mixture of enemies that are immune to acrobatic attacks and ones who aren’t, this can lead to unintentional deaths. The game also has an auto-lock on system, and while it is a subtle one that almost always locks on to the enemy you want to attack, the moments when it doesn’t aren’t particularly fun. The combat is riddled with small problems such as these and while none of them are enough to ruin the experience on their own, their combined force certainly is. The rewind feature does considerably reduce the blow these issues normally would deal to your patience, but if you run out of sand you’ll notice how broken the combat really is.
The game is pretty short — I clocked in about 9 hours — and coupled with the fact that there really isn’t any replay value, this can pose a problem. You can unlock the first Prince of Persia(a side-scroller from 1989 – I didn’t manage to unlock it) and I suppose that would extend playtime, but if you’re looking for a long game that can be played over and over again, look elsewhere.
Despite the game’s shortness and frustrating combat, I enjoyed it a great deal and am more than satisfied with my purchase. The game is several years old and considering how cheap the game is nowadays, I cannot do anything but recommends it.
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A retro review seems like it could be a really cool game design article. Focusing on how the game ages, what would be considered outdated, things that it shares with modern games, etc.
You talked about a few of those aspects, but focusing on it more could be cool.
This game isn’t old enough to be considered retro. Unless your a 6 year old.
hey…right on time