A great adventure dragged down by annoying issues.
And do not get me started on the boss fights, some of which are a real pain in the neck. Why? You have to use the stealth kills. I managed to get past the first boss and the twins after a couple of tries but the Vizier, holy smokes. It's frustrating to the point of insanity. The stealth kills do not work properly, either that or it's way, way, way to difficult to pull them off. Eventually I managed to, sort of get the hang of it, in the last fight of the game. It has to be perfectly timed, down to the second, down to the exact move of the remote. I eventually finished it, followed by a sigh of relief, then another stage after that? But that one's easy. Why is that easy? No stealth kills required.
As you probably can guess I have a real problem with the controls, go to google and look it up, several people have problems getting the stealth kills to work. But apart from that, the platforming works great, some exceptions, those diagonal jumps from those platforms sent me in the direction I did not want to go. Thakfully the rewind time thing is here, otherwise it would be one of the most frustrating games of all time. The graphics are bland, with occasionally impressive large scale environments. The music is okay, I miss the heavy metal soundtrack from Warrior Within though, no Godsmack here unfortunately. Framerate varies between smooth and choppy. The chariot races are fun. The sections where the Prince goes "dark" are good, with a cool chain weapon, too bad there's a time limit, that's right, your health depletes as time goes, you need to get more sand to stay alive. I'm really trashing the game but the platforming, which is the majority of the game is perfectly fine.
Prince of Persia Rival Swords has great platforming, braindead waggle-rific fighting and infuriatingly difficult stealth kills. Look, I'm all for challenging games, but there's a difference between a game being challenging and cheap, and this game blurs that line multiple times. Get the Two Thrones for the GameCube instead.