Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

I played through this, mostly enjoying it, until the ludiscrously scripted Quicktime-event boss fight with the enormous giant in the arena, and his endlessly more dangerous ally The Cameraman. At which point I chucked it as crap. I even tried it a couple of times using a walkthrough to tell me exactly what I wanted to do and when, but the difficulty is not working out what you want to do, it's all from working out which collection of keys will make that happen. When my controls are restricted to Forward-Back-Left-Right, the camera is pointing North, the Prince is pointing East, and I want to go NE, which button should I press, keeping in mind that a giant as big as a 3-story building - who spontaneously sprouted from a normal guard - is coming to get me, but the camera is facing the wrong way so I have no idea which direction he'll be coming from? They train you up in playing the game, then completely change the rules for how anything works for the boss fights. It's just idiotic.

While not at the level of light-hearted as that of the first one, this is still a great game and a good return from (what I consider) a disappointing WW. The gameplay is still top-notch, and the battles seem to have gotten a bit harder. The boss battles are a welcome addition, although using quick-time events isn't something that sat right with me. The chariot sequences were finicky, though, and dying is pretty much mandatory for the first playthrough. The best part is that the game returns to a linear, yet open, setting, which fixes my main complaint of WW of familiar environments and therefore boring to explore and boring to explore, and feels like I'm on a journey. The final sequence in particular is one of my favorite moments in any POP. The dark prince also has one of the best performances in the entire franchise. My main criticism lies in the characters. Farah's back (thankfully) and she and the prince traverse much of the game together, even if she is always on a different path than you are. Their interactions vary. On one hand, their conversations about their pasts are insightful and well-performed, but on the other hand, their banter comes across as forced, feeling much less natural than how they talked in the first game. Would absolutely recommend this game as it is a great entry to the franchise and wraps the trilogy up nicely.

This PoP is probably my favorite one. Everything is better than the previous titles. +stealth mechanic that helps quite a lot and makes the combat better. +interesting story based from what happened on WoT. +better and refined platforming. +Better controls. +Better boss fights. The reason why I'm giving a 3 star rating is because the amount of technical problems. -Black textures -Menu at times disappear -Voices get cut off at times for no reason -Even though I love the stealth, the detection from enemies is broken at times. They can spot you through walls and stuff at times, and then you can be right next to them and they don't see you. -The boss fights for the most part are better than the previous titles, but wtf is that final boss? The first PoP is still the superior one of all the 3 games, maybe the combat can be a bit outdated, but it performs better than Wot and 2T.

Upon managing to complete the previous two entries, decided to give this one a try. However right now my progress have come to a complete halt thanks to a bug which prevents me from jumping from one 45 degree platform to another. This one is not the only bug to occur to me during the playthrough however: - Prince cannot go down from the chains, sure you can get him "unstuck" from them but it happens really unpredictably - Sometimes the game just displays a black screen, forcing me to end the process using task manager - Turning the camera around is an incredibly slow endeavour, and mouse sensitivity option basically does nothing - Sometimes I get tutorials for keyboard/mouse controls, other times the game thinks that I have a controller plugged in (this one is moreso a little annoyance compared to other stuff I've mentioned but still...) I only encountered ONE major bug during my playthrough of Warrior Within (which tbf almost killed the playthru if I hadn't used a save game editor there), and considering how infamously buggy that game is, this is saying something. And this is embarassing because this is the LATEST entry in the Sands of Time trilogy, surely they'd seen the previous complaints and tried to fix em for this game, right? Right??? So yeah, the entire trilogy has problems on modern hardware, this one oddly even moreso than the rest.

I bought this because I owned this on original Xbox. Game couldn't start until I did some fixes. Controllers, which worked plug and play style in the other POP games, are screwed up and unusable. Numerous glitches caused random deaths; falling through platforms, not grabbing ledges, and wall-running into invisible walls. Most solved by dying and retrying but 2 were completely impassable. They required a download of a saved game in order to complete the game. Great game, but I'm wish I hadn't gone down this infuriating road in the first place.