Prince of Persia®: The Sands of Time

One of the best in Ubisoft's catalogue and probably the best in the Prince series, undoubtedly. The other gripes people here list aren't ones I share, personally. The game is challenging, but not at all excessive in its challenge, if you're up to it. Combat is EXTREMELY fun -- occasionally frustrating, but that's part of the appeal, somehow. The camera isn't perfect, no, but doesn't seem much better or worse than in any other well-made game. I have no idea what the save points complaint is about either -- if anything the game has too many save points, as they come after every section you complete, with a checkpoint in between. The Sands of Time is essentially comprised of puzzle/platform portions as blended with combat sections, and Ubisoft got the mixture damn near perfect here. Story-wise, it certainly holds up, and the Prince's internal dialogue/voice-acting really bring you into the experience (personally, I loved the VA). Probably my only real complaint about the game, at least through to about the halfway point, is Farah's story, and her character in general, are virtually non-existent. Especially having played the latest Prince iteration recently, it doesn't come close. But this is nitpicking in light of everything else the game has to offer. The audio is phenomenal, blending some rocking Western style stuff with beautiful Middle Eastern music. The inclusion of a soundtrack here is easily worth the purchase price alone, as some users have noted already, especially with it being seemingly very rare and expensive elsewhere. Graphically, the Prince still holds up VERY well, even after more than five years -- granted, the leap in graphics was not as big these last couple of generations, but nevertheless. If you're smart enough to have a monitor capable of a resolution higher than the maximum allowed, be sure to check the forum for how to take advantage of it with this gorgeous title -- I have it running at 1680x1050 on max settings and it's pretty breathtaking. Bottom line is, if you like or love adventure games and/or platformers, this is a gem to have for your collection. And if you're not keen on these types of games, try out a demo online -- you may surprise yourself and end up loving it.

Feel really horrible giving this review only two stars as so much of it is just amazing. But however much praise is rightly lavished on the great visuals and the wonderful platforming elements, the fact is that the camera and combat are abysmal. For reasons known only to the developers of the PC port, the directional controls are wedded to the camera - and the camera has a mind of its own. In practice this means accidentally sending the prince off the side of disappearing bridges when you press forward but the camera switches to a profile view of the prince at the last minute; or repeatedly running up rather than along a wall in a time-limited obstacle segment; or just the old favourite of suddenly finding your view obscured by a pillar when surrounded by three or four enemies. The combat is boring and repetitive, none of the enemies are particularly imaginative or fun to fight but in certain sections the same lumbering monsters will keep spawning for an interminable length of time. Plus, the camera decides to add another string to its bow of horror by auto selecting enemies to attack. It's necessary to finish enemies as they lie on the ground or else they will rise up to fight again, but the camera will often insist you switch focus to another standing enemy right when you're ready to strike. This makes the already horrible fights last even longer. In short, large parts of the game are very fun, definitely. However, when this game is bad it is horrific. Too horrific to make up for the lovely bits, unfortunately. Given the popularity and age of the game I'm a bit shocked that at least the camera issues haven't been fixed in all this time.

"Prince of Persia: Sands of Time" is one of the most infuriating, irritating, and aggravating games I've ever had the PLEASURE of playing! Nearly everything about this game is great, except for the poorly-conceived camera system. First, the good: This is a fantastic update to the original "Prince of Persia" game(s), retaining the charm of the original while adding a whole new level of modern sophistication. The 3D graphics are great, having a colorful, cartoonish charm, and still look spectacular even without some modern enhancements like bump-mapping and motion-blurring. The plot, characters, and voice acting are very entertaining, keeping the player interested enough to want to play the game to its conclusion. Special mention must go to both the Prince himself and his female companion, Farah. The Prince has a youthful, cocky charm, making him a fun player-character. His non-player companion, Farah, is one of the most wonderfully-conceived NPC's I've ever seen in an action game! Her spunky charm makes you hope/want to see her and the Prince hook up at the end, and her skills are complimentary to the Prince's, making her a valuable ally and not a hindrance. The animation is superb! The prince is able to perform some amazing acrobatics that are exhilarating to watch, putting circus performers to shame, yet the acrobatics remain believable. The prince can run up walls, swing from ropes and flagpoles, tumble forwards, and do spectacular leaps, and other stunts that would have Jackie Chan seething with jealousy! The action elements are very fun, alternating from fighting, dodging, climbing, swinging, running, and puzzle-solving. The puzzles are often head-scratching at first, but never so obscure that you won't figure them out or defeat them after some trial and error. Some puzzles and traps do require a fair amount of dexterity with the controls, though. This is an action game, after all. The bad: THE CAMERA POSITIONING IS OFTEN CRAZY! For most of the casual parts of the game, the camera viewpoint seems to work, but at many critical points, the camera switches the viewpoint in the middle of the action, leading to many a frustrating death. For example, there's a point where you must cross a bridge by running forward as the bridge collapses behind you. You push the joystick forward (up), and the Prince runs forward. Suddenly, midway across the bridge, the camera switches to the SIDE VIEW of the bridge. Guess what? Pushing forward (up) now sends the Prince off the side of the bridge, plunging to his screaming death! That was extremely frustrating to the point of insanity! This camera positioning problem is my only major gripe. Often times, the switching camera viewpoint makes playing the game almost "Dragon's Lair-esque," where you have to time your movements against the switching camera at critical moments. Only the greatness of everything else in the game was able to compensate for this frustrating "feature." Another minor "bad:" I thought that the end boss was a bit too easy to defeat. Not enough to make the ending unsatisfying, but just a touch of a let-down. Still, this is an extremely minor gripe, especially compared to the "camera" frustrations. Overall: The camera problems nearly made me quit the game many times in frustration, but EVERYTHING else in the game is classic stuff, possibly making "Sands of Time" one of the greatest games ever made! The very fun play mechanics and swashbuckling action, along with a great story and a wonderful NPC in the form of Farah makes this one of the best games I've ever played. I consider PoP:SoT to be one of the best games ever made, despite my hatred of the camera system. I STILL recommend the game highly, but be forewarned that the game may push your frustration threshold to the limit.

First up, this is a rather short game; it took me about 10.5 hours in one sitting, and that's with a lot of time wasted in two particular sections. It's very pretty and when you're on a roll, quite fun to play. Unfortunately, although it escapes many issues common to platformers, it still suffers from occasional camera problems and the control issues, particularly in combat. Overall, it is easy, but this enhances the frustration of several much harder sections. VISUALS: Although most levels are pretty monochromatic, it never seems dull or undercolored. The visuals fit the setting perfectly, and some of the more open levels are really gorgeous. Close inspection will reveal that some elements are rather low-poly, especially the characters, but the detailed textures and fluid animations compensate for this so well that you'll rarely notice. It should run smoothly with attractive settings on any fairly recent system. The prince's superhuman acrobatics manage to look extremely natural thanks to excellent animations and smooth transitions from one to the next. However, combat is less polished and sometimes felt positively jerky by comparison - each move is fluid and elegant (the game will sometimes smoothly go into slow motion to show off a particularly nice flip), but transitions there are lacking, and sometimes the prince appears to complete one move before he is ready to do another. This is a minor complaint from the visual attractiveness standpoint, but it can interfere with gameplay at times (see below). CONTROLS: As usual with a console-focused game, the controls are quite simple; WASD for movement, mouse buttons for attack and special movement, space for jump/roll, E for dagger use, and R for time manipulation. With so few buttons, everything is very context-sensitive, and this generally works very well; in the platforming sections you can really get into a smooth roll taking the prince from action to action simply by pointing him the right way and tapping space or RMB. It can be a bit frustrating if you're not headed in quite the right direction and the game decides you want to run up a wall instead of along it, but thanks to the time-reversal mechanic, this is usually a survivable problem. This may be in part due to the coarseness of WASD for movement compared to a console stick (at least in scenes were camera control via mouse is too limited). Camera angles are a significant contributor to control issues; your movement is relative to the camera, so any time the camera suddenly switches direction, so will you. This is most noticeable when it makes you run back out of a small room right after you run in, but the biggest problems occur in combat. The game does not use transparency for close shots, so rooms with pillars can be terribly annoying, as the camera pops around frequently, potentially redirecting you into an enemy. At times (particularly in towers), the camera will switch to a fixed angle, which are not always well chosen - it may not be clear where you need to go until you switch to first-person view, after which a blind leap may be in order. Fortunately, this is an infrequent problem, and again there is more of a problem in combat when you ask for a fixed angle and find it suddenly reverted. The simplicity of the controls can be a real handicap in combat though. Jump is a context-sensitive action, and when your sword is out, you can't jump over shin-high walls, instead preparing for a leap attack. Furniture and other destructible scenery cannot be jumped over or bounced off of, making it a huge trap in some fights. Furthermore, the lack of a basic jump feature means that low sweeping attacks are both unblockable and unavoidable if you have anything behind you, which seems awfully silly for our leap-happy prince. The prince turns somewhat slowly, which is helpful when the camera moves during platforming sections but can seriously throw off your aim in combat, because it can hard to tell exactly where the prince is facing. This combines with involuntary camera movement, the lack of a target indicator, and the context-sensitive dagger button to produce the most irritating and common combat failure: after killing an enemy, you must stab him with the dagger in a certain time limit, or he rises again . . . but if the game decides you're aiming at a nearby enemy instead, you will use valuable time and a dagger charge by stabbing him (freezing him) instead. STORY/ACTING: This game suffers a bit from the cliche use of British accents to indicate royal/classy characters, which is a bit jarring given the setting. I suppose it's better than trying a middle-eastern accented English though. A few of the NPCs you'll briefly encounter are a bit irritating (security system guard, I'm looking at you!), but nothing grates horribly. Your companion Farah is not overly chatty, but there is some fun banter between the two of you. She does sometimes respond briefly to what you're doing in-game, as well as shouting warnings in combat (or apologizing if she shoots you, a nice touch). The story is acceptable and even a bit original, communicated largely by voice-overs from the prince. The framing story (worked nicely into the whole tale at the end) is that the Prince is telling the tale of his daring exploits, which leads to amusing comments when you die - "wait, no, that didn't happen! Let me back up." The big mechanic of the game is time-reversal, which in addition to being a wonderful idea for a platformer, is tied in to a core element of the story. DIFFICULTY: This is generally a very easy game, thanks in large part to the wonderful time-reversal mechanic. When you screw up a jump, you can use a charge from your dagger to reverse time, which is amusing and almost completely alleviates the frustrations common to 3D platformers or caused by dodgy controls. Just be sure to back up far enough; in reverse it is easy to mistake the beginning of a move as a rest position, thus wasting the charge as you watch the prince leap to his death once again. Another common frustration is eliminated by making it impossible to fall off an edge - any time you do, the prince will grab on and hang there indefinitely, and the key for dropping off (C) is thankfully used for nothing else, so it's very hard to press accidentally. Of course, in a timed section or on a moving platform, that slip may kill you or force you to go back anyway, but it is often recoverable at least once. Furthermore, many of the timed sections involve a slowly closing door and various blade traps, which turn off when time runs out, making returning to the start a lot easier. There are (silent) checkpoints throughout the game, generally when switching between areas or encountering a cutscene, in addition to a large number of visible save points (including one after every major combat); I can only think of one really painful platforming section with a long area between checkpoints that ends in a particularly hard segment. That particularly hard segment is one of the only really dangerous moves: the downward chimney-leap. The prince can climb up a narrow gap by leaping from wall to wall, and you do this fairly often. However, a really wide gap allows the prince to climb down by this same method, only the timing is completely different, and you do it two or possibly three times and messing up on the first few is lethal. This is moderately irritating when it is soon after a checkpoint, so you can practice by failing repeatedly, but near the end of the game, there is an incredibly frustrating section where it comes at the end of a long, tedious sequence (with one further complication I will not spoil). With the exception of that one part, platforming is not a problem (particularly with the "visions" you receive to guide you and the completely linear path). Due mostly to the control difficulties mentioned above, combat is where you will encounter most problems. I've already covered most of the specific frustrations, but even with those, only a few combats are much of a challenge, thanks to time reversal (again, be careful to go far enough; it is easy to miss the beginning of an attack move in reverse) and the tremendous same-ness of fighting. With all but a few enemies, spamming jump+attack will have you lethally flipping about the arena, destroying everyone. Unfortunately, later enemies can counter this, hurting and staggering you in the process, which is doubly bad since you use the same key for evasive rolls. In later combats, you will be stabbed from behind by an off-screen enemy with depressing frequency. Getting boxed in by jump-blocking enemies is generally lethal and thanks to the camera often goes unnoticed until it is too late to time-warp out of, but only happens a lot in a couple crowded areas. Unfortunately, the hardest part of the game by far is also the most aggravating, a single fight near the end that took me almost an hour and a half to finish. Out of 41 chapters, a single fight took 14% of my total play time! The incredible difficulty spike here felt rather unfair, and the fact that most of my deaths were directly attributable to the control system made things that much worse. I'll go into more detail in the section below. LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: As I've mentioned, the levels are both very pretty and highly linear - you will not generally spend much time trying to figure out what to do. If you have trouble, return to a save point to watch a short vision full of hints. This removes one of the potential sources of challenge, but more importantly it removes one of the key frustrations platformers can induce. A little attention to the environment will let you find 10 very helpful life upgrades, and a couple dagger-upgrading sand clouds are slightly hidden or require an extra trick to reach, but other than that, there isn't much exploration needed or possible. Some of the areas look very challenging and feel like you're doing something very cool without actually being all that hard, thanks to the time reversal saving you from little slip-ups (a limited but sufficient number of times). The descent into the prison springs to mind - long strings of retracting platforms and timed elevator leaps that flow beautifully. Overall, the platforming is excellent, blending at least the appearance of challenge with a near absence of frustration. Combat is a mixed bag; early on it feels pretty cool as you flip over enemies, stab them in creative ways, and earn some sweet slo-mo zooms, but it eventually gets pretty boring, and as mentioned above, is a lot less smooth than the platforming due to delays between actions (which can also hurt!). Farah requires protection from time to time, but is actually helpful, staggering enemies with arrows that only rarely hit you, and even successfully defending herself a lot of the time. By the mid game, almost every combat is either boring or aggravating, depending on how much the area triggers camera and control issues. Key culprits are pillars, which cause excessive camera popping, and furniture, which unreasonably obstructs your movement but fails to create usable bottlenecks because enemies warp behind you once they are far enough away. The fact that most fights are too easy despite all that indicates how weak the combat is overall (and the final fight stands out as particularly unsatisfying; I took maybe three hits and never used any sand). The horribly hard fight mentioned above combines every feature that brings out problems with combat. Farah stands in a corner, meaning that any rescue attempt is likely to get you trapped, there is a lovely drapery around her half of the arena that the camera likes to get stuck behind, the curved wall offers ample opportunity for sudden camera changes, the arena is just big enough to prompt enemies to warp behind you, but not large enough to maneuver around a cluster and safely use the dagger on a fallen foe (due to the camera and crowding in several areas, the game is far more likely than usual to redirect a finishing stab to a different enemy), and when it isn't blocked, the camera is often too close to show enemies behind you preparing to stab (or simply turning any evasive roll into a blocked leap-over attempt). Getting knocked down often gets you surrounded and unable to get up. This would be bad enough in any fight, but in the longest fight of the game, with exclusively heavy enemies, it will make you hate the developers with a burning passion. THE VERDICT: Sands of Time has the makings of a truly perfect plaformer: fun sections, a few challenge rewards, a neat mechanic to rescue you from small mistakes, nice scenery and beautiful action animation. Unfortunately, it doesn't really provide much challenge in the parts that work well (although all the dangerous traps can create that feeling without actually hurting you), and the only real difficulty comes from a couple sections where poor design choices lead to unnecessary frustration. That one horrible fight alone might have almost brought it down to a 4 even if everything else were perfect, but the fact that control and camera weakness occur throughout and are only mitigated by the overall easiness put it definitely in that territory. It's probably not possible to make a platformer that is both challenging and never frustrating, but even when I wasn't angry at it, the weaknesses in Sands of Time were still evident. Between all the "wow, I feel cool now!" moments is a bit too much repetition, and I still can't get over the silliness of things like being unable to just jump at will. Still, all the good parts definitely raise this game far above average and earn it a solid 4.

The combat is not very good, to put it lightly. Mechanically, it gets stale incredibly quickly once you figure out that enemies generally fall into two categories (with about two exceptions): Those weak to vaulting attacks, and those weak to wall jump attacks. You're going to want to exploit this as much as possible, especially near the end of the game where you'll have to make sure to babysit your companion while simultaneously avoiding getting ganged up on. The semi automatic targeting can also often lead to you fighting the controls more than the enemies themselves. That brings me to my next issue: Despite combat being a stinker, the game incorporates way too much of it. Combat sections are frequent and can drag on for ages, sometimes spawning seemingly endless waves of enemies on you. There is no greater relief than seeing the Prince cinematically sheathe his weapons, signalling the combat section is finally over and you can get back to the good parts of the game. You get a power pretty early on that alleviates some of the drag by letting you quickly dispatch many enemies, but it's usually limited to one use per fight. In conclusion, while the platforming is great and the game radiates a lot of charm, it's frankly dragged down quite a lot by the overuse of its incredibly mediocre and tedious combat.