Prince of Persia - "Evil gods, crazy women... what's the difference?"

The Prince of Persia series has gone down a bit of a rocky road over the years. Sands of Time was their best performance, by far. It had fun platforming, slick combat and a pretty good story with likeable characters. Warrior Within removed most of the second and replaced the third with a lot of game-breaking bugs that made it so that I couldn’t even finish it. Two Thrones I heard was a slight improvement, but I could never find the Wii version so I never got around to playing it.

Still, my memories of Sands of Time were positive enough to put down 30 bucks for the new Prince of Persia, which is a reset of the story with a brand new Prince in a brand new world. And honestly, if not for a few things, this would be a glowing review. But alas, Ubi once again demonstrated their capacity to ruin a perfectly good product with bugs and a few retarded ideas that should never have made it off the drawing board, not to mention the biggest shafting of the PC consumer they could think of.

So the plot of the game is that you’re a thief (‘Prince’ is his ironic nickname) who wanders into some lost city that has an evil god trapped under it. There you meet Elika…

Let me take a moment to talk about Elika’s character design. Considering Prince of Persia’s pseudo-Middle Eastern theme, I think that a Bollywood temptress is about as good a female lead as you can hope for from one of these games. Certainly beats Farah’s harem girl look or that girl in the steel thong in Warrior Within. But honestly, how much better would she look if her shirt weren’t torn in strategic locations? They really didn’t need to show off that much skin to make her sexy and exotic.

In any case, as you might have guessed, the evil god wakes up and sends his four minions to four sections of the world to corrupt the land and break him out of his jail. The Prince, always a sucker for a pretty face, agrees to help Elika heal the land and stop the evil god guy. Most of the game consists of running across walls and ceilings, jumping over pits, flying and swinging off pillars until you reach the fertile ground, where you will kill a pathetically easy boss and then restore the land.

The first thing you notice while going through this is that the game is stunningly beautiful.

Like really, it is.

Jumping around a world like this is fun for the most part, if only because it let's you take in the wonderful scenery. There's combat too, but it's not really focused upon and there are only like a grand total of six different types of bad guys to fight in the game anyhow (and five of them are almost exactly the same).


The game's storyline is told via dialogue. Any time in the game you can also hit L to talk to Elika, sometimes about the story but often about nothing. In most reviews I’ve read of this game, the reviewer will either hate Elika and like the Prince or hate the Prince and like Elika. I though consider myself pretty neutral to both. The Prince is a lame Lawrence of Arabia type that comes across as being way too American, but still comes up with fairly clever and funny quips now and again. Elika on the other hand is bland and passionless most of the time, though when she does try to crack a joke at the Prince she can often be almost charming.

The net effect is that I don’t have a problem with either of them, but I could still care less about both. But I guess that's better than open hostility. And again, the pretty scenery really makes up for a lot of their flaws.

But anyway, those are the basics, so let's get to the sins of the game.

Sin #1: Bugs

I was expecting this game to crash a lot after Warrior Within, so I was actually surprised to see that it ran at a 100% consistent framerate with no crashes or bullshit. But alas, stability isn’t everything.

At any time in the game you can press a button to get Elika to send a little ball of light out to guide you along your way. It’s an open and complicated world, so this was pretty helpful for getting around. Unless, of course, the light were to do something crazy like take you around in a giant circle and waste five minutes of your time.

Which it did.

Very often.

Honestly, isn’t that the kind of thing that gets caught in testing Ubi? Making sure the glowing light doesn’t go in a big circle? That doesn’t sound so hard to me.

Sin #2: This guy

His name is the Warrior and he’s the boss of one of the areas. Each boss in the game has to be fought a total of five times (four stages per area + a final boss area). Normally, the way you beat a boss is by hitting him with your sword or throwing him around using your power klaw. But with this guy, Ubi decided to mix things up and make it so that he can’t be hurt but you have to use ‘the environment’ to get him. What that means is you have to stand around the edge of a cliff until he comes at you and then you have to knock him back into it.

But then after you knock him back, you have to do a quick time event where you overpower him by pressing the attack button over and over. If you fail, you have to start the whole thing process over again.

Fuck you Ubisoft.

I eventually got through this by getting to the quicktime event, pausing the game, going into the controls section and changing my attack button from my controller to ‘F’ (the F stands for ‘Fuck you’). I can hit F much faster than I can hit a button on my PSX controller, so while the frustration didn’t stop, I at least got through it. But the fact that it was there at all is unforgivable.

Sin #3: Combat in general

As I said, most of the game is platforming and I respect that. But quite frankly, with the exception of Mr. Fucking Stupid above, every boss could be killed in the following way: Circle, X, Triangle, X, Circle, Square. That one combo completely decimates everything it touches. Every boss (except Fuckface) and every enemy takes it in the same way. It made it so that combat was just a mildly irritating event that was thrown in between jumping sequences.

Something as simple as making each boss require a slightly different strategy would have helped stop the monotony a bit.

Sin #4: Leap of faith gameplay

This isn't actually so bad, but I consider it sloppy. Often when doing a jump, you'll come to a point where you don't know what the hell is next... you'll run down a wall and come to the end of it and the choice will be between just falling and jumping and hoping that there's something on the other side. Which is usually okay, as there most often IS something on the other side, but it makes it feel as though you're just running through the game's paces. It's not really timing or strategy on your part... you just press jump when the game wants you to.

Not that bad, but a flaw for sure.

Sin #5: The Ending

I liked where the game's story left off actually, but there's a three hour DLC pack that's coming out that continues the story. And, since it's not coming to PC, I will never get to see or play it.

Yeah, um... fuck you Ubisoft?

Honestly, I bought the game as an expression of pure goodwill towards this company. Sure they have a spotty history, but Sands of Time is great and Beyond Good and Evil was fantastic. The fact that this pack exists at all is part of a fucking bad trend in console gaming where companies try to nickle and dime their consumers by not finishing their fucking game and then releasing the rest of it afterward as a download pack. But randomly fucking over PC gamers (since when is the fucking PC harder to patch than a fucking console game) is just unacceptable.

So in conclusion, Ubisoft should go fucking die in a ditch.