Jordan Mechner’s original Prince of Persia was a groundbreaking game in it’s time. It set a new standard for fluidity in character animation, and spawned a whole genre of memorable titles. Of these, Flashback, Out of This World, and Tomb Raider are probably the most memorable. I’m pleased to say that Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is also a groundbreaking game in it’s own right. The game centers around the story of a Persian Prince, though I suppose that’s a bit obvious. The prince and his father, in a search for “honor and glory” sack the palace of an Indian king. They steal his treasured hourglass and dagger, and take his daughter as a slave-girl. After being tricked into using the dagger to release the sands of time—and destroying the palace of a friendly monarch in the process—the prince must use his new dagger, and it’s time powers to set things right. Graphically, Sands of Time is an amazing achievement. The environments are large, and wonderfully detailed. The little touches, like flaming arrows flying overhead during a battle, really make the situations seem real. The most impressive aspect of the graphics, though, are the character animations. The prince’s movements are likely the most fluid ever to appear in a 3D game. When you’re playing you often can’t even see the transition from one animation to the next. Because of this, the prince doesn’t feel like he’s just character that you can only take through a bunch of canned motions, he feels like a real person in a desperate situation. The sound in Sands of Time is also extremely well done. All the sound effects are very satisfying, especially those used for the time powers. The music is mostly haunting middle-eastern melodies and vocals, with the occasional guitar riff thrown in for good measure. All the voice acting is great. The prince himself narrates the story, as well as talking to himself and Farah, the female lead. Gameplay-wise, Prince of Persia is primarily a puzzle game with some combat thrown in here and there. The prince will spend most of his time trying to find his way through the ruins of a destroyed palace. Since virtually all the rooms have been demolished to the point where there’s only a bare minimum of floor space, he ends up having to make a number of death-defying leaps and such. Fortunately for him, the prince is quite the acrobat. He can run both up and along walls, rebound off them, climb along, up, and down from ledges, swing on ropes and poles and climb columns and other posts. The puzzle aspect of the game comes in combining these actions in order to traverse a space. So you might, say, have to run along a wall over a bed of spikes, grab a horizontal pole, swing around it like a gymnast, dismount towards another wall, rebound off it and grab a ledge. Didn’t quite follow that? You’ll pick it up quickly in Prince of Persia. The combat is a somewhat secondary aspect of gameplay, but it can still be quite impressive. Every once in a while you’ll have to pause in your acrobatics to dispatch a group of enemies. Thankfully, even when fighting large groups, the controls work surprisingly well. The “multi-directional combat system,” as Ubi Soft calls it, is a real no-hassles system. Just hold the direction you want to move or attack, press the button and the prince will do the rest. You may feel as though you’ve lost some control with this scheme, since you don’t get to chose exactly which attack or acrobatic closing move the prince will use, but after playing for awhile you’ll learn which maneuvers will be used in which situations and it’ll feel totally natural. Besides normal attacks, you can do rolling dodges, backflips, counters, leaps over enemies (which you’ve probably seen already in the trailers), and wall-moves like powerful dive-attacks and leaps. Again, all these motions blend together seamlessly to create some pretty impressive fighting. You can move smoothly from attacking one guy, to backflipping over the guy that was coming up behind you. Then, if you so desire, you can kick off the nearby wall into a diving slash which takes one guy down, roll out of that, and come out of the roll stabbing some other poor monster. It’s pretty over the top, but that’s what makes it great. The enemies are not too terribly varied, but after fighting them for awhile you’ll learn their differences. Mostly it's just a matter of which ones are most susceptible to which sorts of attacks. Some cannot be leapt over, others have unblockable attacks, and still others will block pretty much everything but countermoves. This final variety of enemy will lead to you and your opponent countering each other back and forth, in a style very reminiscent of higher level combat in the original Prince of Persia games. The time powers are what really make the game interesting, though. There are five time powers that the prince can make use of in his adventure: The Power of Revival allows you to turn back time by up to ten seconds, at any point. Though it can be used in combat, I found myself using this power most after missing a crucial jump and ending up broken on the ground hundreds of feet below. Just turn back time and try the jump again. This keeps the game’s trial and error aspect from becoming frustrating. The Power of Delay is essentially bullet time. Time slows down for everyone, including you, so that you can either pick your combat actions with care or make your way carefully through some traps. Supposedly normal enemies cannot block your attacks while you are using the power of delay, though I haven’t tested this myself. The Power of Restraint allows you to slow a single enemy's passage through time. Just stab him with the dagger, and he’ll be effectively immobilized for about 10 seconds. Since the enemy isn’t totally frozen in time, just moving really slowly, you can do some pretty neat looking things with them. The default attack on a restrained enemy will knock them into the air where they’ll float-fall for several seconds. Attack them again during this period and the prince will do a frontflip and cut the enemy in half. The Power of Haste is pretty much a fight-finisher. If you have your dagger fully charged with sand from your enemies bodies, you can do this move. It effectively freezes time for everyone but you. You, in contrast, move with unnatural speed to dispatch your enemies. When you use the power of haste you’ll go into a sort of special combat mode. While in this mode, you only need to hold in the direction of an enemy and press attack and you’ll be there knocking them into the air. No walking animation, no nothing, just there—bam—streaking across any amount of space. Attack again and you’ll streak over and cut them in half. Though this power can pretty easily clear a room, the downside is that it takes absolutely all your time power to execute. The Power of Destiny is something that happens only when you enter a save point. You get a series of visions—quick flashes of the future, or of possible futures. This is used both as a plot device and as a sort of in-game hint system. If you get stuck at some point you can go back into the save point and see what sort of things you ought to be working towards. This is another nice touch that keeps the puzzle-style gameplay from being overly frustrating. The game itself is somewhat short. I managed to finish it in a little over nine hours. Fortunately there are some extras and unlockables to provide replay value. Most notable are the complete original Prince of Persia game, and a “making of” feature. So, if you want a visually fantastic game with amazing environments, challenging puzzles, over the top battles, near-perfect controls, and impressive time powers—and who wouldn’t—then go out and pick this one up. It’s a new classic.
Other Helpful Reviews for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
First up is the gameplay. PoP has some excellent controls that are easy to get to grips with. Running along walls, jumping from pole to pole and slashing those nasty sand creatures are all made easy by the very user-frie... Read Full Review
I have to say when I played the first 30min of th game I wasn't overall too impressed. As a matter of fact at that point I would have rated it a 7.5 out of 10. After that I didn't touch the game for about 2 months, a... Read Full Review
