Prince of Persia®: The Sands of Time

I couldn't write a proper review even if I tried, but Sands of Time brought me moments good enough and memorable enough to share. Before I go into Shameless Praising Mode, let me address the game's one issue: controls. It takes some time to get used to the camera movement. It takes even more time to coordinate your actions enough so that Prince would do what you want him to do. Be ready for a good dose of frustration, because the likely scenario for the first moments/hours of gameplay would be: 1st hour: 'What the heck is wrong with this camera?' 2nd hour: 'Left! LEFT not backwaaa... [rewind]' 3rd hour: [rewind] [rewind] [out of sand - reload] [rewind]... 4th hour: 'mwhahaha I took out all your guards, now it's only you and m..huh?'[reload]' #th hour: Congrats, after winning the Palace Fight you've mastered control & combat system enough to play the rest of the game. However, Sands of Time has so many great features it's easy to overlook this tiny hindrance. [shameless praising mode] From eye-candy graphics and amazing level design to beautiful soundtrack, this game is a jewel among Ubisoft creations. It's a fast-paced fabulous adventure made with touch of magic, spiced with hilarious banters between main characters. Enjoy spectacular animations, master acrobatic moves and help the Prince save his kingdom from imminent doom. Preferably with minimal loss of blood and clothing along the way. Overall, of all recent Prince of Persia titles, Sands of Time is my personal preference. An incredible tale in a true 'Arabian Nights' style. [/shameless praising mode]

I'll start off by quoting 'Yahtzee' Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame, who said that the Prince of Persia trilogy was the best series of the last generation of consoles. While I wouldn't go as far as that, I can't deny that this game is phenomenal, and I can't wait for the two sequels to be GOG'ed. The gameplay mechanic of playing with time is incredible - it makes you wonder how the developers of Timeshift can moan about the problems of implementing time reversal when this game did it several years before. It never gets old seeing yourself epic-leap up a cliff, get unstabbed and backflip over an enemy whilst going back in time - getting killed becomes a 5 second entertainment, in a way. Of course, when you run out of sand tanks so you can no longer rewind, getting sent back to earlier in the game seems irritating, but this is only notable in how little it happens so long as you pay attention to the environments. There are a few moments that make players want to shed both their tears and hair, but these are very few. The most notable is when you are locked in a chamber with a proverbial ton of enemies, and after battling all these you must defeat your father. This can take about half an hour to an hour, but for the player that perseveres, the game becomes gradually more rewarding from this point onwards. The style of the game is excellent - from the crazy black and white visions to the enemy sand monsters to the giant aviary level, the design is consistently outstanding. The soundtrack is nothing too memorable, but it's enjoyable to listen to, and I can say, having played both the PS2 and PC versions of this game, this version visually rips its console brethren apart. To conclude - you should prioritise this over almost anything else on GOG, with the possible exception of Beyond Good and Evil.

Sands of Time is a game that approaches greatness but some flaws prevent it from getting there. Two of the biggest issues are somewhat tied together so they need to be mentioned together as well: The fighting and the camera. The combat system is a rare case where fighting enemies either feels insultingly easy or anger-inducingly frustating, with barely any middle ground. And it never really feels fun. The enemies are dumb and single-minded and almost every one of them can be dispatched with one of two attacks, either doing the "Vault over, slash, stab"-combo, or the "launch from a wall, hit, stab"-attack. These two will be repeated ad nauseam since in most encounters more enemies will keep spawning so that there's always four guys attacking the player, until all of the predetermined amount of enemies in that location are destroyed. In most cases this is 15-20 enemies, but in two seperate occasions there's closer to 50 bad guys waiting for their predecessors to be killed. In this regard there's very little challenge to the fighting and it becomes boring quickly. But then the camera is factored in. Outside of normal gameplay the camera works fine but when fighting it becomes a hinderance. It can get stuck behind a pillar or show just the combatants' legs or even just shake around in an epileptic seizure when it's trying to decide which angle to go for. The player can control the camera but then it easily becomes a tug-of-war between the player and the invisible cameraman. There is also a fixed, alternative camera angle to use, which can be good or bad in a fighting situation as it's often far away from the action or possibly hiding an enemy behind a column. The camera problem is exasperated by how the prince controls in relation to the camera. If you push towards an enemy and jump in an effort to vault over him and in that moment the camera moves just enough, the game instead decides the push wasn't towards the enemy but to the side of him, making the prince do a roll along the ground instead. In a similar fashion, finishing off a downed enemy can easily be turned into a stab at another by the camera's wonkiness. In the two enemy-heavy encounters mentioned above the game can quickly become frustating when mistakes occur not because of the player's fault, but because the unhelpful camera and the controls tied to it make it hard to do an easy task. You also have to protect an NPC in these two encounters, which also adds to the frustation. It's difficult to even try for a tactical position or retreat in order to take the enemies down one by one, since they will simply teleport closer to the prince when they're a certain distance away. New enemies also teleport in out of thin air, often close enough to be an instant threat. A few minor technical problems also pop up. The characters' speech is very quiet at times, even though I had the speech setting at 100% and the rest at half that. This forced me to tweak my sound settings constantly and considering how much of the game's charm comes from the characters' back-and-forth, it is something of an issue. There are no subtitles either. There was one music track which sounded like it had electric guitars in it, which didn't really fit in to the theme of the game. All that said, outside the combat the game is great fun. The environments are lovely to look at and it's fun to initially see where you're supposed to go, think "How am I supposed to get over there?" and then figure out the path of climbing, swinging, wall-jumping and generally parkouring your way over, under and through the obstacles. The prince will occasionally run out of the room he just entered or run up a wall instead of across it because of the controls-tied-to-the-camera-angle thing, but since there are no enemies present it's mostly only worthy of a frown. The game is quite short, only taking around seven hours to complete on one's first playthrough when the puzzles are still a mystery. Had I purchased this at release at retail price I would've been disappointed, but GOG's price far better reflects the time investment required to finish the adventure. Sadly, this PC version lacks the original 1989 Prince of Persia game which the console versions all had as an unlockable bonus. Due to the issues explained I have no desire to replay the game again. If there was a version of the game that eschewed the combat in favour of more environments to explore and parkour in I would be all over it. In conclusion, while the flawed camera and combat systems keep the game from being as good as it might have been, it should still be played for the great platforming, cool environments and a nice story.

I loved and truely enjoyed playing every part of this game. It was challenging and fun, unique and interesting throughout every minute. Remember the last time you sat down to play for only an hour or so, and forgot completely about the time, realizing that you've been there over 2 hours? PoP:TSoT will do that to you.