Prince of Persia
The new Prince of Persia game is out. Naturally I got it on release day; I adore the series - the original was the first game I ever played! Sands of Time is one of very, very few games I have replayed since the PS2/gamecube/xbox era began.
I've made quite a bit of progress in the several hours I have played. I would say that I am liking it; I'd say I am disappointed. It's not threatening Sand's throne.
The Prince himself (thief, actually) is the best since the one in Sands. He's quite funny, and has plenty of quoteable lines. He's got loads of well-voiced dialogue, most of it situational. When you press the left triggfer he will chat with Elika or, if you have exhausted the current conversation offerings, make a comment to himself. The banter between the Prince and Elika is very well written. Indeed, Elika marks a return - at long last! - to the highs of Farah. She's a decent female character, a person in her own right, with motivations and brains. She's not eye candy, and she's not there to coo at the Prince. With the exception of cutscenes all of their dialogue is optional, so players can choose whether they want to watch the duo play I spy in the middle of a death trap.
There's a great injoke for fans of the series. At the start the Prince is stumbling around in the desert searching for Farah. Wait until you find out who Farah is.
The world is beautiful. I find it hard to like. Unlike most of the previous games, the world is not a single coherant location. It's not one palace put together in a semi-logical way, believable as a real place. It's got hovering half-pipes and upside down flying shipwrecks. It's made to be interesting to traverse, and I find that works against it. It's too surreal, too obviously fake.
The new PoP is famous for two design decisions. The Elika rescue, and the reduced controls. I find ones works nicely, the other hurts the game.
Elika stops the Prince from dying. This does not mean you cannot fail, as some have assumed. It means that when you fail you get put back just before the point where you died. In platforming this means the last solid peice of ground, in combat it means you get back on your feet. It's not a free pass. In combat your enemy will recover some health, in platforming you will have to repeat any sections which lay between the solid ground and the part where you died. It's a natural evolution of the rewind function of the sands of time.
The reduced controls are the issue. First let me say that I liked Assassin's Creed very much, and part of that liking was due to its reduced control scheme. I liked holding down a single button and aiming Altair at where I wanted to go, and leaving the game to handle the jumping, scambling and climbing as necessary. I always felt in control. I always felt graceful and athletic. I always knew what Altair would do in a situation.
In PoP I don't feel any of those three vital things. I don't feel in control. I don't trust the Prince. I feel like a clumsy clod footed oaf. That's the problem. When it all works the Prince will bound and leap through some amazing looking acrobatics with a press or two of a button. When it doesn't you'll end up jumping off into oblivion, or missing a vital grab. Some of the assignments go against the training all other games give players. Others aren't fully logical. Some must be performed in a narrow window of time without any prompt. Take this example. You want to jump up from some vines you have climbed to reach the ledge above. You press A. You want to jump up from a ring you are hanging on to reach the next ledge. You press ... B. Why the difference? You're jumping up. It should be the same. You can hang on those vines for hours. You will fall off the ring unless you hit B within several seconds. Why the difference? They are essentially reskins of the same situation.
There are situations where you think you should press a button and don't need to. Wall running is bad for this. Pressing and holding A initiates a wall run. Releasing and tapping A makes you jump off. There are points where it looks like you need to press and hold A a second time to initiate a new wall run. It's decpetive layout; you end up jumping off into thin air. Later on you will encounter a similar section and not bother pressing A because last time it got you killed. Except this time you did need to initiate a second wall run, and so you fall to your death.
What's more there are commands which are unclear. Do I need to mash Y to use plates, or is tapping it at the precise point in the animation enough? Do I need to hold B to wall run off a ring, or is tapping it ok? It's quite ridiculous; I've cleared 8 worlds and I still don't feel confident in these basic moves.
The lack of control pitfall is always present, including (especially?) when the system is working. You're still doing very little to influence what is happening. So much of it is automatic or canned. The Prince will do what looks like 7 or 8 different moves, and your involvement was limited to pressing A 3 times.
The Prince does not feel fluid and agile. He's a bit ... heavy, for wont of a better description.
As for combat, I've no idea. None. Zip. Each button is tied to a specific kind of attack. Hit that button for that kind of attack, and try to chain attacks together to do more damage. Sounds straight forward. The problem is that most of the time the basic sword gets blocked, the gauntlet has zero range, and the combos are totally unpredictable. I hit buttons and have no idea what to expect. There's canned animation in most of the combos, some of them are little more than mini-cutscenes. If I ask for 2 sword attacks followed up by a magic attack then that's what I expect to see, not a sword attack followed by a jump, followed by a wrestling match, followed by Elika doing nothing. I can ask the Prince to boost an enemy into the air and smack him off the ledge, only to watch him slash the enemy with his sword and get blocked, and thumped by a counter attack. More than once I have ended up pinning an enemy to a wall and insta-killing them, and I've no idea how or why, because I was doing the same old x,x,x, y,y,y button mash I now rely on. I don't feel like I am controlling what is happening at all and I hate it.
The good news is that combat has been reined in. There's much less of it. So far there's perhaps 3 battles per world, including the boss. That's mostly good news, as I found Warrior Within and Two Thrones had gone too combat heavy. It's even better news given how much I hate combat in this one. At the same time that is a touch shocking; while previously I felt there was too much fighting, I usually enjoyed it. The sword fighting was the thing which attracted me to the DOS game in the first place.
That all sounds terribly negative. The game is worth playing, and I don't regret buying it. The Prince and Elika are delightful; I progress to hear what they have to say. It's fairly apparant that Ubisoft were aiming for the aspect they nailed dead on in Sands and then lost in the two sequels: the fairytale feel, the story, the characters you didn't want to hurl into a pool of acid, the adventure. They have hit that aspect again, but sadly slipped on gameplay.
"Run, jump, die. Run, jump, die. Run, jump, die - I think I'm getting the hang of this!" - the Prince, random comment.
"Is there anything else you want to tell me?" - the Prince.
"You are an idiot." - Elika.
"You're getting pretty good at saving me, princess." - the Prince, random comment.
"I have had a lot of practice." - Elika.
"Gold cups. Gold plates. Gold gold ..." - the Prince, dreaming idly between near death experiences.
"Princess, he's a dark god. How good do you think you look?" - the Prince, in response to Elika asking him if he was helping her purely because she is a pretty damsel in distress.
I've forgotten so many of the best lines.
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Originally Posted by frogbeastegg
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