The thing about the Prince of Persia legacy is that it’s been given the perfect game already, and everything that’s followed has been either trying to be that particular title with a slight twist, or something desperate to break out of the huge cage of expectations that followed The Sands of Time.
Yeah, you wish it was him. Suck it up.
The game itself is a work of art, quite literally; all the textures are like something out of Watercolour Challenge, and it’s an energizing take on the cel-shaded revolution put in place by Nintendo’s Wind Waker title. However, the initial look was a shock to gamers searching for that gritty mud-brown and meh-grey bleak colour scheme that seems all too popular nowadays. Hell, the only game that got away without the cliché stamp was Fallout 3 and they had to nuke the landscape to have an excuse.
However, there’ve been a ton of colourful, wonderfully designed game worlds in the last few years, but for the vast majority, they’ve all been horrendous. Mainly because the only games that even dare to put colours verging on happy are titles intended for children, such as the Viva Piñata series. But the colour was the first thing that struck me in the game, as the visuals made me feel like I was watching a very well crafted film. The dust sprays away from the princes feet as he lands, and the cartoony wisps of mineral-based smoke that dwindle into the air are reminiscent of something out of the creative mind of Nintendo, or Disney, and the game settles into a more relaxed pace.
The “relaxed pace” schematic is something Ubisoft have followed with this title to a T – gone are the furious rattling-off of button combinations in order to simply not die, as Warrior Within so melodramatically demonstrated, and in are occasional button pushes that feel like slight nudges towards the Prince’s goal, as opposed to the rigorous constant control of Assassin’s Creed, the Ubisoft title that this game’s control system takes a lot of influence from.
It’s part of the whole parkour uprising in titles. Speaking as someone who played Mirror’s Edge, loved the concept, thought the gameplay was amazing but the story dismal, same going for Ubisoft’s medieval hitman experience; Prince of Persia is a refreshing change of pace. You can run along walls, up walls, across ceilings (albeit briefly), jump, double jump (it’s a double jump, people who try to name it via the manual’s definition are lying to themselves) and so on and so forth. It’s a brilliant system that adds one element to the genre that both Creed and Edge really did suck at; instant restarts.
I’m running along a wall, I don’t jump off in time, and I fall. In Creed, I would have to run along the street, away from guards, get onto the rooftop five blocks from where I was, hide, fail, hide twenty blocks away, then slowly slog my way back. Mirror’s Edge just reset you to a checkpoint miles away - literally sometimes. However, here, I fall, Elika (the game’s thankfully not scantily-clad female sidekick, bless you Ubisoft for being mature) reaches out her magical hand, and I reappear on the last flat surface I jumped off. Brilliant. But the problem with this is I stopped caring. I fell, went, fell, went, and slogged my way through the harder bits by landing often enough that I was slowly moving my checkpoint forward bit by bit. It’s like the Vita-Chambers in Bioshock; lack of penalty for failure will result in lack of interest in it, too.
A small suggestion here, Ubisoft; video game enthusiasts are okay with the concept of dying in a game. It’s not real. We did it a thousand times in Ghosts and Ghouls, Geometry Wars and the wonderfully unforgiving Library level on Halo‘s legendary difficulty setting. Let him die. Let him restart from the beginning. Don’t go all the way and give us a “lives” system, because the only franchise still doing that so anally is Sonic, and I don’t even need to mention Unleashed before everyone groans. Instant restarts do indeed speed up the pace and help not interrupt the flow of the game experience, but playing the same five seconds of a path over and over is boring. Let me go back a minute or so, pick a different route, and go that way. Or, I would, if you hadn’t secretly structured the game world so that’s impossible and only ONE path leads to ONE area and that’s that. The gameplay begins to feel a bit military then, and it’s a tad depressing to know that a game with freerunnning elements isn’t actually very free at all.
The gameplay does help support the experience, though, as the free-running adds a lot of pace to a storyline that doesn’t need any, but benefits nonetheless. Big Evil God, four lieutenants, some creature-like underlings and a big cage to chuck them all back in. I’ve done this before. But I liked the twist; this time the Big Nice God isn’t here. In fact, he left ages ago because he couldn’t face the music for the Big Evil God being so nasty and not wanting to be caged for a thousand years. This left me with a sense of independence, that it really was up to my character and not some half-arsed celestial long-term contingency plan involving a mere mortal and a god who can shape landscapes but apparently can’t keep one shaped around his evil counterpart.
So, the story pans out, the gameplay is fun, and the art style is great. The music’s a nice touch as well, as I think you can notch up any music you find yourself humming days later, or simply leaving on in the background when you’re not playing. It’s all comprised of enjoyable orchestral pieces, and they’re tame enough to be background-esque without taking charge of the experience, which is another reason why I’d never buy a game John Williams wrote the score for, as the only thing I got out of Lego Star Wars was sixteen notes stuck in my head for a month.
It’s a title worth a look, and definitely something you shouldn’t pay too much attention to the bad reviews about. Those who slam bold adventures in today’s gaming scene, such as this, Mirror’s Edge and others, should really learn to stop and take a look at the sales figures for LittleBigPlanet, Viva Piñata, Grim Fandango and interestingly enough, Gears of War in my opinion.
He who dares, wins.
