Prince of Persia

Forget everything you know about Prince of Persia. Forget about the original game from 1989 through to the recent trilogy of POP games released by Ubisoft. The new POP takes all your preconceptions about platform games and throws them out of the window. Once you've played this game you'll never look back. What is it exactly that makes a game such as this so special?

Prince of Persia starts out with your character, the eponymous Prince, returning from an adventure with his treasure laden donkey, Farah (one of many sly references to the previous trilogy) only to be caught up in a sudden sandstorm. Emerging from the storm the Prince finds himself lost and without Farah in sight. He soon stumbles on Elika who turns out to be the princess of a tribe of warriors tasked with the mission of guarding the tree of life which contains the dark god Ahriman and prevents him from escaping to unleash his evil upon their lands. Of course this status quo doesn't remain intact for very long after the Prince's arrival as Elika's father destroys the tree of life for reasons of his own and let's Ahriman's power corrupt the land with the release of the 4 Corrupted.

With Ahriman let loose, the only way for Elika and the Prince to restore the balance of the land is to cleanse each of the world's fertile grounds. This is where your journey as the Prince truly begins. You have free reign to go wherever you want and to approach the game from any angle. The only thing that holds you back is in which order you choose to take Elika's powers that she is imbued with. Comparisons have been made between Prince of Persia and Shadow of the Colossus and while it may not be strictly true that the games are alike, they do share a similar approach to game design and atmosphere and it really can't be a bad thing to be compared to one of the most moving and innovative games of the last few years.

Prince of Persia doesn't believe in punishing you, the player. There are no deaths in POP. Yes, you can never die. The worst that can happen is that you'll be saved by your Elika and that your enemy regains a portion of his health. At no point in the game will you be left frustrated or confused as to where you should be going or what you should be doing to make progress. In a time of hardcore games this is a refreshingly different approach that I applaud. Ubisoft's way of thinking is that players shouldn't be punished if they fail, but they should rather be rewarded for trying out new approaches and moves. Don't be fooled though, it still boils down to a cleverly disguised checkpoint system at the end of the day but the way its presented to the gamer is a marvel of game design that even lets ham fisted gamers such as myself feel a sense of pride in my platforming accomplishments.

The platforming sections are slick and well made with a beautiful flow to them. Its this flow that permeates the majority of the gameplay with platforming and combat both benefiting from a gamer who is aware of the “rhythm” inherent in them. By this I mean that the gameplay aspects make use of smooth button inputs to make the prince transition from one move to the other with no pauses between moves. Its a bit hard to explain but once you've played the game you'll be able to see what I mean. Quick time events (QTEs) are used as well during combat but they don't dominate or distract from the game in any way. They serve merely as a visual reminder for you on how to escape from an enemy's clutches, in actual fact you could play the game without resorting to looking at them at all as the moves your character makes are all tied down to specific key combos in a similar way to Assassin's Creed had your various body parts connected to the face buttons. Its this ease of movement that makes the platforming so wonderful. When you get in a rhythm, avoiding traps and pitfalls while using Elika's magical abilities they all fuse together into some monumental runs through the levels with hardly a pause for breath. It's when you reach this point that you realise how wonderful Prince of Persia is.

While you are running through the various lands of Elika's people you'll marvel at their beauty. Each of the 4 worlds has its own look and feel to it which is tied in with the Corrupted who has taken it over. The cell shading of the characters is a marvel to behold and the main characters of Elika and the Prince are wonderfully detailed. The range of animations that the Prince shows while jumping and running from level to level would do Jordan Mechner proud with their smoothness and believability. On par with the graphics is the sound design. There's a beautiful orchestral soundtrack composed by Inon Zur (who was also responsible for Fallout 3's music) and Stuart Chatwood which manages to capture the desolation of Elika's kingdom which is now devoid of life and has become a sad remnant of its once great self.

Amongst all this there is one departure from how games usually present themselves that will determine whether or not you enjoy the game to its fullest, and that is the absence of almost any cut scenes. Why, you might ask, is this significant? Well its because your journey as the Prince is about more than just jumping from level to level and beating up enemies. That has all been done before by games like Super Mario Bros and the like. No, where Prince of Persia excels is in how it makes you become a part of the story. You are the Prince. You'll learn to become interested in the motivations for your actions as well as your back story. All this is done without a single cutscene, you're merely told these snippets of info through brief conversations between Elika and the Prince during levels and these conversations aren't even mandatory so you could play through the whole game without once hearing a single conversation. You'd miss out on what makes the game truly great though as the Prince and Elika slowly reveal more of their characters and you become emotionally attached to them and concerned with their fate and the fate of Elika's kingdom. Do that, and the ending of the game will blow you away all the more. With the upcoming DLC serving as an epilogue to the game's ending there is even more motivation to finish this game.

So overall its easy to see that Prince of Persia is a great game and well worth your time, but one last thing remains to be said about it. Prince of Persia deserves a look no matter what your taste in games. Its a monumental leap forward for the industry with its move away from the norms of the platforming genre and its desire to tell a moving and emotional story without making you slog through a hundred deaths just to see the ending. Ubisoft deserves all the praise it can get for taking this brave step forward.

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