Prince of Persia®: The Sands of Time

As one who's never played this game before I think I'm coming in to this with an unbiased opinion. Having heard all the hype over the years I finally decided to pick this up and I have to say I'm not dissapointed one bit. Sands of Time puts you in the sandals of the titular Prince of Persia. After the Prince's father uses a treacherous Vizier to help him siege a city he uncovers the Sands of Time. The Prince is tricked into unleashing the sands, which seems to begin destroying everything in sight, turning the denizens of the palace into walking abominations. It's up to the Prince to set things right. The plot is unfolded as if the Prince is telling you a story about his adventures, which is really clever because all your deaths are chalked up to his bad memory ("No, no, that's not what happened"). He's by far one of the most acrobatic protagonists you'll encounter and thanks to an easy control scheme (I recommend a gamepad) it only takes one button to jump and one to perform a special context-sensitive action like running up a wall or swinging on a pole. And it's a good thing controls are so simple because you'll be bounding from wall to wall, swinging on poles, running across walls over pits and other sorts of things. Acrobatics have a place in combat, too. The monsters in Sands of Time go down pretty easy but they always have a numerical advantage so button mashing rarely works. The Prince can use his agility to roll, dodge and even leap over his enemies to give himself an advantage. Sands of Time smoothly blends together combat and platforming and both elements make you feel extremely agile and cool. The story is engaging and the voicework (especially the Prince) is commendable. If you're a fan of platformers then this is certainly one you won't want to miss.

I can not do anything more but beg for everyone to play this game. Sure the combat is just passable as best but EVERYTHING else about this game is perfect. The platforming is fun. The story is wonderful. The characters are best I have ever seen in a video game. The last lines of the game sold me on how much I loved the game all those years ago and now I'm replaying it for maybe the 7th time. There is one weird and annoying puzzle late into the game but damn it, it doesn't matter. Not the longest game but one that I always come back to. Warrior Within and Two Thrones are not bad (the chariots sucked in two thrones) but this game is among the best games of the last ten years and it feels like it. The only other bad thing I can say about it is that it took attention away from Beyond Good or Evil.

This game has a lot going for it like a nice simple but fun combat system, but the camera and control mechanics with the direction keys mapping to whatever pov the camera is looking at, and the jerky camera changes make it almost unplayable.

Never played this before and really wanted to give it a shot. However with all the bugs I was getting and just issues with the controls, I decided to just give up and move onto to the next one in the series which hopefully works better. Kept having sound issues where the sound would just stop. The camera movement is just sluggish and fights with you the whole time. Randomly the character will slow down for no reason and start moving as if trying to go walk through knee deep water. Sometimes the character will just bounce all over the place and also would get stuck in places too where I would have to use the rewind to get out. All in all, the game kept fighting with me so I ended up just giving up about 1/5 of the way through. Too bad as I really wanted to give it a good fair shot.

PoP SoT is said to be one of the best all time classics, and for good reasons. It has aged very well, and it is astonishing how fluid combat and acrobatics feel in a game nearly 20 years old. In that regard, I would argue that it can keep up with most modern titles like Assassin's Creed. The atmosphere and quality of environmental puzzles are great. So before going into SoT's flaws, I emphasize that I absolutely recommend playing it, just like the rest of the trilogy. It is a treasure. Combat can feel tedious. It is never really challenging as all enemy types can basically be beaten with the same tactic. Also quantity of enemies is obviously chosen over quality, and often you must beat multiple waves. SoT actually has quite a clever, intuitive combo system, yet it is never explained in the game itself, and it is barely explained in the manual. I would definitely recommend looking it up. Only pain point: counter-attacking. Not only is it also not properly explained, it is also completely useless as hit-and-run tactic is way more effective. Every action in this game has a luxuriant reaction window, only counter-attack has a 1 ms window which is set to the most awkward point possible. In effect, nobody counter-attacks. There are many weak enemies put into the game, like oversized birds, bats, and bugs, which are only there to annoy the player. They are not challenging, they don't do much damage, they are only annoying. Obviously I stress combat so much because it is such a huge part of the game. The camera can be a pain as well. It gets blocked by obstacles in combat, and it makes estimating angle, height, and distance difficult at times. Most of the time it isn't a big issue, though, and the ability to reverse time certainly reduces frustration by a good amount.