Much sand has slipped through the hourglass since Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time made its debut many moons ago, redefining a franchise that many of us began our long gaming journeys with. When the trilogy wrapped up with Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, there was not much left to do with the story considering how beautifully it tied off all loose ends. A new Prince of Persia, if it was ever to be made, was required to cast off its earlier roots and do something new, very much like what The Sands of Time managed to achieve. True to that, the new Prince of Persia game manages to shed off almost all the references to its predecessors and how!

Discarding the soft-tone look of The Sands of Time and the gritty look of Warrior Within, the new Prince of Persia instead looks in the direction of “illustrative” art-design, otherwise known as cel-shading. While dozens of other games like XIII, Crackdown and and Jet Set Radio Future dabbled with cel-shading in games, Prince of Persia emerges with, well, flying colors. The moment you fire up the game, you cannot help but be mesmerized by the visually stunning fantasy world the new Prince inhabits. It’s like the same art style as that of Braid has been multiplied tenfold and represented in glorious 3D for good measure. Every moment of the game feels like you are running through a living, breathing, pulsing watercolor painting in 3D.

Revving under the hood of the new Prince is the same engine that was the backbone of Assassin’s Creed, managing to do an excellent job of bringing to life the troubled land, plagued by the oozing mass of Corruption that is slowly eating away it’s natural beauty – the beauty that springs forth blades of green grass, twittering birds, butterflies and breath taking waterfalls once you have healed the land of corruption. So brilliantly have the two states been represented that even though you will be backtracking through the same land that was earlier an unrecognizable mess, the same will now feel like a completely different place all together once you have healed it. The globs of Corruption that were trying to reach for you a while back would now be replaced with beautiful vines snaking up the walls.

So breathtaking are the vertigo inducing heights, the endless vistas and the rippling waterfalls of Prince of Persia that you would not mind traversing through the same area again just to see how it looks like once the evil has been dispelled. Varying art design from the Queens Quarters to the City Square will ensure that your senses have something to feast upon all the time. It looks absolutely amazing when you have just freed up one part of the land and pan the camera around to see the healed land explode in a gamut of colors while the far of corrupted land awaits your arrival in all its monochromatic glory. So arresting is the look of the game that for once, it was immensely tempting to do a video-review of the game simply because screenshots just cannot do justice to the sheer visual brilliance of the game. In fact, you can expect a video-review pretty soon; the Editor and his dire warnings be damned. If anything, this game absolutely deserves one.

With such an impressive visual style, one can be excused for having dwelled on it for the past four paragraphs but the reality is that great graphics don’t really have to make a great game. This applies, at least in parts, to Prince of Persia as well. While it more than excels at recreating the magical fantasy world lost beneath the sands, it falters badly as far as the story is concerned. The game begins with not much in terms of story exposition except for letting you know that evil has managed to escape and it’s on to you to rescue the land from slipping completely into the jaws of Corruption and deliver it to the proverbial Yin. The rest of the story plays out in cutscenes but offers only morsels of it. The only way you can learn more about the land and its inhabitants and why it’s in such a mess is only by actively engaging your partner, Elika in a conversation.

And that brings us to Elika, the damsel who was supposed to be in distress but does not really turn out to be that way. Ubisoft Montreal seems to have taken a page out of Valve’s books by making a character that will be with you throughout the game but never gets annoying. But Elika’s role in Prince of Persia goes much more beyond what Alyx was tasked with in Half Life 2. Elika is not only a constant companion of the Prince through his journey through the Corrupted Land; she is his guardian angel as well. Misjudge a jump and Elika will be there to whisk you off to safety before you can plummet to your death. If a ledge is beyond your reach, take the jump and invoke Elika mid-air to have her swing you around to cover the remaining distance.

In a re-imagining of the world of Prince of Persia, not only the game’s look been transformed, but how it plays as well, as evident from the way the “game-over” screen and the double-jump mechanism have been given a physical form in Elika, thus never breaking the illusion that the game manages to create. Not only does the game manage to create a truly likable character in Elika but also elegantly deals with the problem of how to prevent the immersion factor from being ruined by the “Game Over” screen. Elika also helps you find your way through the land by forming a glowing orb that snakes along the route that you are supposed to take. Besides being your check point and compass, she also is the voice of reason while the Prince comes out as the exact opposite, trying too hard to be a wise cracking badass. For once, we wish Ubisoft Montreal would have borrowed another leaf from Valve’s book of how-to’s by shutting the Prince up as well!

Once you have come to grips with the new moves that you can pull off in tandem with Elika in the game and managed to tune out the irritating Prince, you can start out on your exploration of the world. The game allows you to take your pick from any part of the world that you want to travel to from the outset – however, some of the lands can be accessed only with some special powers. Exploring each land will include lots of wall running, grappling around hooks, shimmying around ledges and in a brand new move, run upside down on the ceiling in what is called a Roof Run. All of this can be achieved pretty easily with the use of two buttons, requiring no more than a sense of timing to pull it off and chain it with another move flawlessly. The consequences of missing a jump is also less severe as Elika will be there to pull you out from your fall and return you back to safety, often no more than 15 seconds back from where you fell.

While this uber-forgiving gameplay mechanic slash checkpointing system can be a big letdown for those looking for hardcore platforming action, it doesn’t necessarily mean an easy game (as my friend Bulovski puts it, think Braid!). However, what it does is, it gives you the freedom to pull off and string together amazing string of jumps, double-jumps, wall runs and what not’s. The animation flows fluidly during these sequences giving you a thrill like no other. Sliding down slopes, making a double jump to grab on to the horizontal pole and doing the jump again to land safely on the ledge in itself makes for gameplay engaging enough to stop cribbing about dumbing down the difficulty and enjoy it instead. If that’s what the developers were looking for when they decided on this gameplay mechanism, they have succeeded. The game never stops being fun! The music in the game is soothing to the ears though it never really makes any impression. Some of the tracks do loop quite a lot; especially the ones played after healing the lands and can get quite irritating as you progress through the game.

Amidst all this platforming, you will also get to encounter enemies at times. That’s right. At times! Gone is the classic combat from the Sands of Time trilogy. The head-lopping, torso-splitting, six-way dismemberment that was the Free Form Fighting System seen in Warrior Within and The Two Thrones is all gone – replaced by a watered down version of the up-close-and-personal combat seen recently in Assassin’s Creed. These minions of Arihman, the bad guy here, are pretty easy to dispatch in the beginning but get progressively harder in the later part of the game. As you inch closer to end of the game, they develop newer more lethal abilities that ensure you get into a sort of CQB-with-swords thing rather than the staple hack and slash routine. Soon you will have to use more and more combos, invoking Elika’s magical powers as well in addition to using your gauntlet to strike closer to the heart of the corruption. All of this can be pulled off effortlessly if you get the timing right. Making it much easier is the fact that you will never face more than one enemy at any given time. You can also use the environment against the enemy if you do not have the patience to fight until the whole health bar is depleted. Quick time events throw in a little variety in combat from time to time but overall, leave nothing more than a sore thumb.

Character animation, as expected from the series, is top-notch. Whether perched precariously on a high beam or in the heat of combat, the animations are fluid and smooth with no jerky, ragdoll motions between transitions. The Prince and Elika move fluidly around each other, never getting in each other’s way. They will twirl around each other on high ledges, jump out of the way or in a beautifully animated sequence, have the Prince break Elika’s drop by taking her in his arms. The combo animations show off the high-production values, especially the ones that have both you and Elika working in tandem. Superb particle effects shower all around every time you pull of a well timed block with your trusty sword, which incidentally is the only weapon you will ever have in the game. The game slows down at the right moments to show off the unfolding action on-screen. The particle effects are put to great use when the healing sequences are shown off, with the monochromatic world changing into colors bursting with life.

These semi-interactive sequences also mark your progress in the game as once a land is healed, glowing orbs called light seeds show up all around. This is the part where you have to do quite a bit of backtracking to pick up the light seeds. While some are pretty much just lying around in your path, waiting to be picked up, others can be either placed on really high-up ledges, tempting you or else hidden off in some forgotten corner of the map, until you accidentally bump into them. Each light seed collected will count towards a sum total that will help you unlock one of the four special powers. These special powers are specific to four differently colored plates found all across the game levels. Once a power has been unlocked, you can run up to these plates and activate them. This in turn will initiate a mini-game where the Prince and Elika can access different parts of the previous inaccessible areas. These powers are as varied from being propelled or thrown towards the next plate, to flying through the ruins or even running across the walls and ceilings, much like Prey but a whole lot less dizzying. These sequences come as a welcome break from the normal gameplay and are quite engaging.

Prince of Persia in its current gen outing seems to get some things right and some things wrong. The visual style of the game is absolutely mind-blowing while it disappoints story wise, one of the stronger points of its immediate predecessors. While animation is top-notch with fluid movements and spell binding combos, the combat system could have used some tweaking and tuning. There is a lot of backtracking involved in the game but then again, a healed land plays much differently than a corrupted land, making the trip back quite different from the previous one. Platforming elements might seem too simple in the beginning but they add a lot to the gameplay, increasing the fun factor in the process. Ubisoft Montreal has taken the series in a new direction with this iteration of Prince of Persia, quite a brave step in a world of shelves dominated by the same kind of games. Those looking for something similar to the The Sands of Time will come away disappointed. However those who have been bought up upon the SoT trilogy as well as the old-school Prince of Persia games will find it much more engaging. It does boil down to individual preferences in the end but if not anything else, the game is a must-play at least once for its superb use of cel-shading.

8.5 / 10

Review Copy Courtesy:

Price: INR 1299
Distributor: e-Xpress Interactive
Availability: December 18, 2008

IMAGE GALLERY

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By N2H

• rajeev pradhan Says:
  December 19th, 2008 at 1:06 pm

  is the price correct? i heard it was going to be rs.999…

• Vijay Sinha Says:
  December 19th, 2008 at 6:28 pm

  Unfortunately, that is the correct pricing. Sorry, buddy ;/

• Video Review: Prince of Persia (PC) | the ANGRY pixel Says:
  December 22nd, 2008 at 3:13 am

  [...] Review: Prince of Persia (PC) [...]

• Sam Says:
  December 22nd, 2008 at 12:24 pm

  Awesome! for some reason, the youtube version isnt working for me (issue at my end). Downloading the review now

  Great work guys!

• Abhinav Pattanayak Says:
  December 22nd, 2008 at 8:03 pm

  Thanks Sam! Do let us know what you think once you are done watching it.