The Prince returns to the exotic Persia. After his father invades the palace of the Maharajah, the Prince, tricked by a treacherous vizier, uses a magic dagger to release the dangerous Sands of Time from an ornate hourglass. With the aid of a beautiful, mysterious, and potentially untrustworthy ally...
The Prince returns to the exotic Persia. After his father invades the palace of the Maharajah, the Prince, tricked by a treacherous vizier, uses a magic dagger to release the dangerous Sands of Time from an ornate hourglass. With the aid of a beautiful, mysterious, and potentially untrustworthy ally, players guide the Prince to recapture the Sands of Time and restore peace to the land.
Gravity-defying acrobatics, ferocious combos and the ability to bend time to fulfill your destiny
Erase the past, behold the future, and freeze the present in real-time for unlimited gameplay variations
Uncover the mysteries of a world never before explored in action-adventure gaming
I could have loved the game, but the camera just hates me. Swiveling around at the worst possible time, combined with wonky auto-facing just makes some of the more "intense" combat scenes almost unplayable: making you attack the wrong baddie, trying to flip over instead of away from those annoying double-spear guys, and making sure you jump in the wrong direction when you're jumping away from collapsing floors... Most of the time it's not too bad, but having to do the same long fight half a dozen times or more ("Daybreak", e.g.) stops feeling fun.
This game is truly legendary and for good reason. Without it and its sequels, the action-adventure genre would look completely different. We wouldn't have gotten the many masterpieces we've received and the spiritual successor to this franchise -- Assassin's Creed -- would not have even existed (for better or for worse).
In The Sands of Time, you play as the young, athletic titular Prince of Persia as he's thrust into a story centered around a relic that controls the flow of time. Right there, within the plot, is the root of what makes this game so unique. It's not the parkour (though that's a load of fun). It's not the combat. It's not even really the plot itself. No, it's all about the time travel mechanic. Ubisoft Montreal defied expectations by making this game completely different from its predecessors, opting for what boils down to a very stylish platformer with solid combat, enjoyable puzzles and a lot of ways to fail. Where this could have introduced immense frustration at best, or downright unfair difficulty at worst, the time travel mechanic balances it all out. No matter what happens -- you misjudge a jump, get wrecked by an enemy or just run into a bug -- you almost always have a second chance to retry that moment by rewinding time.
This is what makes the game so fun, unique and memorable. When you fail, the game quite literally encourages you to rewind and figure out where you went wrong. This creates a level of strategy and critical thinking that never fully takes you out of the moment or the action. This, combined with extremely solid gameplay, an intriguing plot and extremely atmospheric, dream-like world building to create a game that's not only a blast to play, but one that also still holds up extremely well today.
If you enjoy games of this sort, The Sands of Time is a must-play. It's worth a lot more than what you spend on it; plus, it's always affordable even at full price, just grab it now!
Game runs on Windows 11, but needs a bit of tweaking to work properly - i.e. you need to edit an .ini file to fix the broken shadow effect, and you need to run the game through Steam to get proper controller support with mappable buttons and sticks. Other than that, yes, works fine. Maximum resolution is 1600x1200, no widescreen support, recommend using v-sync or else your GPU is gonna be spitting out thousands of frames per second.
It plays fine, just as it did back in day, and it looks pleasant too. But I can't recommend this game for the simple reason that I'm hard of hearing and this game lacks subtitles. I legitimately have no idea what's going on storywise because all the audio seems to be coming from a bathtub.
I grew up playing these games. I actually remember buying Sands of Time at launch with my own money as a kid and here I am buying it again as an adult, though it's much cheaper now. So how do I think it holds up?
Let me start buying saying the game runs fine on my modern computer. No tinkering required out of the box unless you want to get higher resolutions or use a third party controller emulator. Out of the box I had no troubles using keyboard and mouse or setting up my wired Xbox 360 gamepad. Annoyingly, to save and interact with menus you have to use your mouse regardless of whether or not you have a gamepad set up. It's not too bad but worth mentioning.
Let's be real. If you buy this game, it's for the time mechanics/platforming puzzls. And that I can say holds up. It's as satisfying as ever to survey the area and move around the environment. The camera is a bit iffy. It loves to fight with you. It frequently does this awful slow mo "look how cool you are running on a wall" perspective and that kind of take me out of it a bit, but otherwise for a game this old it holds up.
What you are probably not buying this game for is combat and there is a lot of it. It's a lot of flash and no substance sadly. Using your time mechanics in combat often feels like an uneccessary after thought and I find that simply jumping over enemy heads and slashing them to be the best way win fights. It feels like Arkham Asylum combat before Arkham Asylum did it, so it's boring at best, tedious at worst.
I find it hard to reccomend to anyone who doesn't have nostalgia goggles like me. If you haven't played it and want fun cinematic adventure with some fun platforming, give it a shot. It's a relic from a by gone era. When Ubisoft made games that were meant to fun rather than microtransaction machines, and for that alone it's worth going back in time.
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