Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is easily one of this year’s best games. Its excellent polish, style, and fun gameplay never waiver from start to finish. Ubisoft’s latest action adventure is a new take on the older Prince of Persia (1 & 2), and retains a lot of the themes from its predecessors. Older gamers might recognize the floor spikes, and hanging onto ledges, but will thankfully not be burdened by the original's punishing difficulty level. In fact, it seems like Ubisoft went out of their way to make Prince of Persia an easy and accessible game. This is not to say the game is not hard, but due to the game’s premise and mechanics, you have just about as many tries as you want to do things.

You are the Prince of Persia (as you might have guessed), and your father has just conquered a rival kingdom in battle. Huge battles aren’t really your thing so you break off from the battle and decide to steal away into their vault and take the dagger of time. You are unaware of its powers at this point and are tricked into unlocking the Sands of Time. The sands unfortunately turn everyone except you, the evil wizard that tricked you, and a young girl named Farah, into bloodthirsty sand zombies. You and Farah must find a way to undo your mistake and defeat the evil wizard while fighting your way through sand zombies and the castle’s puzzles. The game’s story gets better and more complicated as you play through the game, but I’ll just leave it at that as not to spoil any of your fun.

The story, as good as it is, takes a backseat to the gameplay. You are never allowed to forget the story though, due to the fact that the entire game is played as a story that the Prince is telling. So when you fall in battle or miss a jump and die, the Prince will say something like, “No, no, I didn’t die then, let me start again.” It’s not terribly easy to die though, with the power of the dagger at your disposal, you can effectively rewind time up to about 10 or 15 seconds and redo whatever led you to your demise, whether it is a faulty jump or an attack that should have been a dodge. The dagger is also the key to defeating the sand zombies, as you can absorb their sand into the dagger into “sand tanks.” These sand tanks serve as your fuel for rewinding time, and the more zombies you kill and sand you absorb, the more tanks you’ll get. You can also use the dagger to freeze your enemies into a super slow time state allowing you to perform cool looking finishing moves. If all your tanks and extra canisters are full, you can also perform a special move that allows you to freeze everyone and zip around wreaking havoc. You won’t have to figure all this out for yourself either, the game has an excellent tutorial that tells you information as you need it. The save points of the game also give glimpses into the future, providing helpful information about how to solve upcoming puzzles and at the beginning, show you the moves you’re about to learn.

The Prince himself is quite the acrobat. In battle you can easily handle large groups of enemies by bouncing off walls, vaulting over enemies and slashing them as you descend, and dodging attacks they throw at you. Your enemies don’t attack very often, so for the most part, winning depends on how you can get around their blocks and large numbers. Your compatriot Farah is not without usefulness either, as she will provide support fire with her bow. Occasionally she will hit you with an arrow, but that ends up being funny rather than annoying due to the excellent dialogue they share. All of your attacks can be accomplished using the attack and jump buttons. You would think fighting would be pretty bland with just two buttons, but the Prince does different attacks depending on which enemy is targeted and where they are, so battle is never the same and always looks “right.” The sand zombies aren’t particularly fast, but they can teleport to wherever you are, and when they have the chance, they’ll teleport into you, knocking you down. Whenever you do get injured, you can take a drink of water from pools or water fountains nearby. Since our friends the sand zombies attack so rarely, you can usually stock up on life whenever you’re running low. With water to replenish your life, a super agile hero to dodge attacks, support fire, AND the ability to rewind time if you mess up, you won’t find yourself losing many battles. When Farah is with you, there’s some added difficulty of making sure she’s alive, but for the most part she can hold her own, and can take a considerable amount of damage. While the fighting comes off as overly easy, it’s still incredibly fun to play and to watch.

The meat of the game is not fighting however. You will be solving intricate puzzles for the majority of the time. The puzzles are highly varied in environment and solution, but usually involve you using your ability to wall run, swing on bars, shimmy and jump to either open a door or get to another place. You have complete control of the camera and the ability to switch to either first person or a zoomed out view to get a better feel for your surroundings. It’s never that difficult to figure out what to do next, thanks to the visions you get at the save points, and fly-throughs whenever you enter a new area. The difficulty lies in timing your jumps right and landing all the extremely fancy maneuvering the Prince is capable of, but since you can rewind time and redo missed jumps, you won’t ever find yourself frustrated or stuck.

While you’re hopping around over spikes and slaying sand zombies, you will look very good doing it. Prince of Persia is a gorgeous game and really pushes the cube to the limits of what it can do. If you’re familiar with Splinter Cell, you’ll recognize the lighting effects that are present in just about every room you enter, and the soft ambient glow that permeates the entire castle, giving a sort of mystical feeling to the whole journey. The game reeks of meticulous design and effort. When you’re wet, you can’t run up walls and you’ll hear your shoes slip as they lose traction. All the characters are extremely well modeled and have very believable animations. Whenever you switch camera modes, the camera quick zooms around for a startlingly cool effect. The special effects, like when you absorb a fallen sand zombie or perform special moves, are phenomenal. All the animations, detail, effects and polish roll into a treat for the eyes. The game looks so good in fact that when your friends come over to see what your new fangled “Gamecube” can do, this will undoubtedly be the game you show them.

The sound is not as overpowering as the graphics, but they go a long way to set up the feel of wherever you are. Be it a rushing wind or a slow drip in a sewer area, the environmental sounds are perfect. The music, primarily heard in battle, uses a mixture of Arabian and modern rock tones, and really adds to the suspense. There is an odd lack of music throughout the rest of the game though. When you’re running along the wall to jump and catch a ladder, that is exactly what you’ll hear, feet running on a wall, and hands catching a ladder. There is no ambient music whatsoever, but instead of making the rest of the game boring, it really serves to remind you that in this once busy castle, only three people are left alive. The Prince and Farah both have very well cast voice talent and since they’ll do a lot of talking outside of cutscenes, their voices are the primary windows into their characters.

With the rewinding time ability, scenes from the future to show you what to do, and zombies that don’t attack much, the game is extremely easy. This makes it very accessible to people who aren’t hardcore gamers, but it also means that if you were looking for a challenge, you won’t find it. It also seems a bit odd that the entire castle is locked up in such a way that only an extremely agile man of exactly your abilities can unlock it. You can unlock the original Prince of Persia game when you beat Sand of Time, but you won’t get any new experiences by replaying the game. That said, since the game is a great looking, great sounding, and fun story all in one package, you’ll probably find yourself playing it again in the future anyway, new experience or no. Prince of Persia: The Sand of Time is an easy recommendation for everyone. Go play this game.