Prince of Persia®: The Sands of Time

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.

One of those games that translates a few measley clicks of a mouse or key into amazingly fluid control. It is grin-inducing sending the prince running along the wall to backflip over an enemy while simultaneously decapitating him. POP makes it just involved enough that you are totally controlling the prince, and you need to stay attentive and be on top of things, but you will never have to wrestle with the controls or do too much too fast. This is the core of the gameplay. The raw combat is similarly fun, but can become a bit more of a clickfest than the platforming portions. The graphics are charming with a dusky, mysterious Arabian Nights attitude. Very atmospheric. The story is OK by game standards, but bottom line, there is no way you won't have a whole bunch of hours of fun with Prince of Persia, and it's definitely not a rehash of any other game you've played.

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.

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.

Really wanted to give this game a higher score since i really liked the story and the way it was presented for the most part. The reason for my rating is mostly down to the combat in the game. At the start of the game, enemies aren't much to worry about since you can jump over most of them or dodge around them easily. Once you gain an ally, it's when you really get to see what the combat is going to be like for the rest of the game. Enemies tend to crowd around you and teleport if you try to move away to isolate any of them. While you do have good abilities to help you (reverse time,freeze enemies, jump over, dodge roll) they just didn't hlep with my frustration. The fact that you have to finish enemies with your time dagger also made the fights annoying. At times fights would drag on because i couldn't finish off the enemies cause the others would crowd in and not allow me to finsh the enemy on the ground or it would result in me reversing time to avoid attacks. All of the previous complains might of been acceptable if it wasn't for the camera. The camera is controllable but only to a certain degree. It tends to get stuck behind walls or goes behind curtains or pillars during combat. At least the puzzle are good to ok. The platforming is also ok but again the camera does complicate things at times. Did run into a few bugs, biggest was the fog that i had to turn off at the start of the game. I played it with kb for a bit before switching to controller. Had to look up the console controls to map the controller since it was unmapped by default. Overall im glad i got to experience the story of this game.