For the last few days, I have dedicated all of my gaming resources towards the Prince of Persia reboot. My first session with it made enough of an impact on me to drop everything else I was playing and play through this to the end. I don’t know why people hate on this game so much because I enjoyed it all the way through. Granted, it has flaws, but was definitely worth my time.
First, I wanted to state my view on the fact that you never die in this game. Having gone through reviews and online message boards, this seemed to have struck a nerve with a lot of people. Until I played it, I didn’t really appreciate that the idea, but I came to love it within the context of this game.
When you think about death in games, 99.999% of the time it’s not truly “death”. It’s a fail-state that occurs when you do something the game doesn’t want you to do. It punishes you by taking you back to a certain point, or by ending your game and forcing you to start over. In a game like the Prince of Persia, you are bound to cause a ton of fail-states due to the trickiness of the platforming. Instead of forcing the player to watch a death animation and have the game reload from their last checkpoint, which will add up to a large amount of time, why not just quick re-spawn? It saved me a lot of time and never took me out of the experience. The mechanic was also explained excellently thanks to the inclusion of Elika, which makes perfect sense within this world. Maybe Prince of Persia fans are masochists, but I much prefer this method than having to sit through countless death animations and loading screens.
Even with Elika at your side, this game isn’t “easy”, per se. The platforming does require you to be able to string together a series of acrobatic moves to get to where you need to go, which can be challenging. Where the mechanic does hinder the game though, is in the combat. These are sequences where you’re supposed to feel threatened by your enemy, but because you know you can’t die, it does take off some of the tension. With that said, the fights still involve a lot of effort on your part and are fun to play. I had a lot of fun stringing together the Prince’s attacks and Elika’s attacks for massive damage.
Speaking of Elika, she is an awesome character and in a way, more important than the Prince. The game does set you up to really like her through all the ways that her and the Prince interact. Besides cut-scenes, you can hit the L-trigger at any time to talk to her. Sometimes it’s contextual to the situation or the area you’re in, and other time’s it’s random non-sense that helps deepen the bond. But there are a ton of other little touches too that help you build that connection, such as how they hold hands and twirl around when they need to adjust their position on a narrow beam, or how you carry her on your back when you climb on vines. Even though the Prince comes off as a jerk at times (especially at the beginning), they do form a great chemistry that’s hard not to buy into. It’s great to have Elika around, as this game is a pretty lonely experience. The majority of the game is just you and Elika in this massive world, and maybe 15% of the game features characters other than you two. Since the Prince and Elika relationship works so well, the lack of other peripheral or major characters to the story doesn’t take away from the experience.
The world in which this game takes place in is a sight to behold. Thanks to the fantastic art direction, the game is a treat to look at. At times, I almost felt like it was starting to approach Disney-levels of presentation. All of the levels are extremely fantastical, to the point where you could never imagine any society living here. But what kind of threw me off more about these worlds is the way that they’re designed. While it is an open world and you can go from zone to zone at your leisure, there is virtually no room for improvisation. It’s fun to roam around the paths that Ubisoft made for the user, but they really do feel like pre-made paths rather than making the user feel like they’re actually an acrobatic genius making things up on the fly.
The other “gamey” part of the experience that really stuck out to me in a bad way was the light seeds portions of gameplay. In the story, they explain it to the user as a means of strengthening Elika to help seal Ahrimen, but it’s really obvious that this whole portion of the game is there just to artificially extend the life of the game by making the user go through each level for a second time. Sure, you only need to collect half of them to beat the game, and you don’t need to go out of your way to get enough to get by, but it’s very clear that they’re trying to stretch the experience for you.
I don’t think it needed that stretching. Either that, or mix up the formula more. I was able to beat the game in under 12 hours, which actually felt a bit long for this game. For the most part, I really liked what I played, but the game does suffer from a lack of variety. It never strays far from it’s core formula and it repeats it a lot. I think this game would have benefited from either being shorter, or featuring more variety.
The Prince of Persia was a pleasure to play. It saddens me to see Ubisoft abandon this style so quickly, because I have 0 interest in playing a Sands of Time style game, even if it’s tied to Jake Gyllenhaal. It still also makes me feel weird to read other gamers trash this game, because I can’t agree with them on a lot of points. Regardless of what anyone else says, I had a good time with this one.
In Third Person 