Prince of Persia

The negatives stand out though the theme, graphics, sound FX and orchestral music are top notch; it falls flat on basically everything else. The story is a classic - the god of decay has corrupted the land and is about to escape from prison leaving you to restore the land one zone at a time. Your companion is key to the plot but little changes throughout the adventure and the twists come as no surprise. Its also unfinished, this being the 13,372,805th game which ends on a cliffhanger. Thoughtfully, the real ending was ripped from the game and packaged as the world's 525,858,542nd DLC and features no tangible changes and another subtly different cliffhanger. NPC Characterisation fairs a little better insofar as there is some - you find out about the world and your companion through conversations, then grow to hate her as she flirts with settling on one of the personalities she'd read genuine people had. The prince also flipflops between personas and while scenes are congruous in isolation, I challenge you to drink every time you fail to predict the tone of a cutscene before it plays out and see if you can render the game challenging through insobriety. Gameplay is mostly traversal - it's ok, but its slow and stiff with constant interruptions to pace due to the prince 'catching' Elika when she catches up. Your glove slows descent and can't be released so you grind down every wall. There are some nice touches like the vertical poles which flip you 180 and the rings to extend wall runs, but the supermove pads are nonsense and bounce you around the levels arbitrarily. Combat is frustratingly basic and riddled with quicktime events and randomness, and finally, there are 3 very simple linear algebra puzzles in the game. Overall, PoP is weak. It's not terrible despite the above whinge-fest - it just suffers from a low skill ceiling that doesn't allow for faster or more risky play - it's like a safe, on-rails ride without the candyfloss and queues.

The game essentially is about collecting over 500 light orbs in some semi-open world. It's like Pacman in 3D, only much worse. After just an hour or so, you have essentially seen everything that there is to see. The map is laid out in a way, and the orbs are placed in such a way, that you have to traverse the same sections again and again. It's awful. The story is simple, but intriguing. The characters on the other hand... I mean, they aren't quite as awful, but the "Prince" is too much of a modern hipster. The character and relation development doesn't really feel natural. But to be honest, they are quite forgettable. Combat is... bad. Just bad. It's stiff, unresponsive, too "cinema-like", full of QTE and insane button mashing, and fights can either be over in seconds or last for a (literal) eternity. That's one of the worst regressions I have ever seen. I have really tried to like this game. It has so much untapped potential and is, in principle, a welcome change. The visuals look astonishing. The acrobatics feel great and Elika is such a wonderful addition. It's quite delightful seeing them working together to overcome obstacles. But in the end, it's just a tedious chore. With quite a daring bitter sweet ending, I might add.

I beat this game when it was released, even my friends who loved PoP didn't buy this game. So I'm the only one I still know personally to ever even play this specific, and sadly, last version of the series. Honestly, I'm curious about the development of this game, because it's very odd. The combat system is a strange combo/rhythm ... "thing" that I never enjoyed, and honestly, all the fights just come across as frustrating. It feels like they made one of the only 2 things this game does, combat and exploration, a weird minigame, rather than an actual thought-out combat system. The other piece is exploration, which is fine. I don't enjoy parkour necessarily, PoP has more going for it than just free, fluid movement. It's set in a really cool world with great things to see, and while this world is graphically amazing it's, for story reasons, completely fucking empty. So you run around dead worlds, with nothing but light orbs in them, reach blatant arena areas to fight copy-paste minigame DDR dance battles with evil dudes, and eventually do the same thing again, but for the boss. I titled this "potential" because I really feel like this exact world, in a different game, would have been amazing to experience. With NPC's, actual combat, an intriguing story. Instead, I guess the developers played Shadows of Colossus and lost a bet, because what we got is the strangest PoP experience that rightfully killed it off for good.

I really like the painterly look of this game and the main cast is clearly having a good time and have fun personalities even if the story they fall is very simple (darkness bad, light and plants good). The parkour is pretty and ideally running around and up and over pretty landscapes is fun in theory. This is not a sequel or a prequel to the original theory but a reboot, but it's not irritating. The problem is this has been dumbed down hard. The Prince cannot run, he just speed walks everywhere (probably because his sword is way too big to be practical). Combat is just blocking forever until an opening presents itself then jamming several types of attack until a meter goes down and it's always one on one. The part that made me most annoyed though was the fact The Prince will not grab onto certain ledges if he's not going the 'right' way He'll just slide off some surfaces, jump the wrong way, or just stop moving forward and fall. And whenever this happens he'll scream and moan and need to be rescued. After the sixtieth time of The Prince falling, screaming, and reappearing far away from his goal I got annoyed. This is clearly an analogue to the sands of time rewind power, but there you could choose how far back and to where you started when you messed up. Here it's decided for you, the cutscene is unskipable, the screen changes color anticipating your failure, and frankly there's times he REALLY should have grabbed onto a ledge instead of just gave up and died. Then there's the hundreds of glowing life seeds you need to collect in enemy free environments after you finish each level. Fun for awhile but so spread out you get bored looking for them. A valiant attempt to revitalize the franchise and try something new, but it needs to be fun as well as new, and this wasn't quite.

I like the game. It aged very well and the two protagonists have a great dynamic. I also like the fact that most dialogues are optional, you don't have to Elika. Not so good: The flying is a pain (in my opinion). Why is Elika flying such weird routes? Is she drunk? The fights: I appreciate that we cannot really die but fighting is so tedious: Block, counterblock, attack, block and so on. Lot's of quick time events in the fights as well. My poor mouse: In the last fight I had to trigger the attack button so fast that she is still in shock. The ending-ending was sort of a bummer. The prince should be smarter.