Awaken the merciless Warrior Within! Back from the brink of death the
Prince has to face his most fearsome opponent yet. The mythical beast
Dahaka won’t rest until our hero is dead. In his struggle for survival the
Prince ventures onto the mysterious and foreboding Cursed Island, where he
faces a ho...
Awaken the merciless Warrior Within! Back from the brink of death the
Prince has to face his most fearsome opponent yet. The mythical beast
Dahaka won’t rest until our hero is dead. In his struggle for survival the
Prince ventures onto the mysterious and foreboding Cursed Island, where he
faces a horde of dark, demonic creatures. Fortunately, our hero isn’t the
boyscout he used to be. With his newly found inner badassdom and a new
arsenal of deadly weapons and fighting techniques, he’s ready for whatever
danger he might encounter. Or is he?
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within builds a new layer of depth and
complexity on the dynamic combat system of it’s predecessor, The Sands of
Time. Freeform fighting mechanics combined with a wide range of swords,
axes, maces and even improvised weapons will allow you to slay your foes
with style!
The Prince is back in his darker, brutish incarnation.
Special moves and ranged attacks in a new, dynamic combat system.
Environments to bedazzle your eyes and puzzles to strain your mind.
Please be advised that Windows 10 operating system will receive frequent hardware driver and software updates following its release; this may affect game compatibility
Recommended system requirements:
Please be advised that Windows 10 operating system will receive frequent hardware driver and software updates following its release; this may affect game compatibility
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Warrior Within was a controversial release. It's not surprising - the ar direction was completely different from the beautiful magical Sands of Time, the narration went from a fairy tale to a teenage Godsmack fan wet fantasy. Hell, the sand enemies BLEED. As in red blood.
These things are incredibly stupid, i'm not even going to try to justify them, apart from saying, that the art design is actually quite good, even if quite "grungy". But what is absolutely amazing about Warrior Within, is gameplay. The game is very open-ended, playing closer to Metroidvania title, than to the linear experience of SoT. The combat, the worst part of SoT (even though it had some good ideas and looked good), is absolutely fantastic. In fact, i still consider it the best of its kind, God of War, eat your heart out. And the acrobatics and avoiding the traps is still as good as in SoT.
So, what we have is probably the best Prince of Persia game (sorry, the classic one), which unfortunately has some issues in terms of art direction and the story. And some technical issues, which i expect to find in the GOG release as well, since the game was never patched. So you may experience no sound in several cutscenes and few annoying bugs. There are very few, but it's still a shame, that Ubisoft never bothered to fix them.
P.S. There's also a nice bonus for PoP fans in the form of tons of videos in this game. Videos about history of PoP and about making of Warrior Within. Very interesting stuff.
As some of the reviewers mentioned, this game is different in style than Sands Of Time or the Two Thrones. I couldn't tell, because the Warior Within was the first game I played from the resurrected franchise and boy, what an experience it has been.
The story is quite simple - the prince messed with the timeline (in the SOT) and now a mystical monster "Dahaka - the guardian of the timeline" is after him. Dahaka is unbeatable and unstoppable so even a swift, agile and ever-so-cunning prince can't hope to manage running away forever. So he decides to beat his pursuer the way he got into this mess... to go back in time and prevent the sands of time from ever being created.
To stay with the theme, the artwork matches the dark atmosphere, you as the prince must overcome dark and gloomy ruins on your way to your goal. The landscapes are rather dark and the background music (although sounding more like electro-industrial than the persian ethno one might have expected) just stress the pressure that is exerted on the prince to stay alive. The backdrop is not dark and desolate all the time, though. To proceed further in the story and get to otherwise unreachable areas, you alternate between the present ruins and the lush gardens (and a pretty intricate mechanical tower) that are filled with sand monsters and booby traps - obviously noone wants the prince to mess with the Island of time.
The combat system is excellent, whether you are yielding one sword or also a secondary weapon (that decays with each hit), slashes, grabs, jumps can be connected to nice combos and the surroundings work to the prince's avantage - rebounding of the walls or revolving around columns to perform another fine slash to decapitate your enemies, or simply throwing your secondary wepon at those nasty ninja-women on the beams to bring them down to the abyss... In the last case, you won't get the sand slot refilled (all monsters leave sands of time that get stored in your medailon), but you can pass the beam without getting slashed yourself. Whenever you find yourself on the losing side, you can use the sands of time to rewind (last cca 10seconds) so you can correct your mistakes. Or you can slow the time down (later in the game) or perform a powerful attack (yet later) to gain the upper hand.
As mentioned, there is one enemy you can't win against - the Dahaka (he gets his hands - umm, nasty tentacles? - on the prince and it's game over, man!), so as The Doors sing "there's nothing left to do, but run, Run, RUN!" Running from the Dahaka make up for the best part of the game, where your free running skills are put to test. It's pure adrenaline rush, where you really feel that you gotta get away to a safe place (behind the water - the Dahaka, badass as he is, is afraid of the H2O). You might not be able to make it the first or second time, but the difficulty is not so bad - you should be able to find the corerct route and improve your speed on the third or fourth attempt :o).
There are some "puzzles" along the way, but nothing difficult, it's rather of the "see that lever? turn it and run back through the door before it closes" variety. More challenging is the climbing of the area to get where you need to - again only thanks to the princes amazing free running skills. Mastering them wil take a little time, but unless you're a complete moron, you'd be swinging on the rods, running along the walls and sliding down the gobelings in no time... The only tricky part is timing the wall-jumps correctly. Unfortunately, there are several narrow halls you have to climb by jumping wall to wall several times and a missed timing results in a long fall (and a quick rewind only to fall again).
To sum this long babbling up - this game is a masterpiece that draws you in for an ultimate gaming experience. I have to admit, the first time I played it it was a cracked version and I felt so guilty to enjoy it so much for free (it wasn't in stores in my country at that time). I simply had to buy this title now, just to pay my debt! And for $9.99, you gotta be kidding me...
If you read this far, the only thing to do is to add this title to your basket too! :o)
To get a more pleasant game experience:
- Take note of the widescreen fix, among other things (PCGamingWiki)
- Learn about known bugs (Fandom)
- Manually remap the controller - xbox one compatible (Steam guide)
- If feasible, boost the colors on your monitor to the max.
It's irksome, but I recommend to have a look at the walkthrough (Gamespot) mainly to not miss the well-hidden and challenging Life-upgrades (leading to the canonical ending), but also to take the best path, for those who don't like to be lost, and limit the backtracking you'll endure anyway.
Orientation is tricky, the map is useless.
I've heard the game is difficult. "Nonsense!" I exclaimed. Then, I chose the most difficult level.
Challenge accepted. And it was... Difficult. But not awful. Old school difficulty. Gone is the immature and pretentious young prince !
I recommend this difficulty for those who will seek for Life-upgrades, understand combos (memorizing only the most useful ones) and learn about secondary weapons (very little information in the game, it's poorly done).
The "tutorial" introduction is already a spike in the learning curve, as it quickly leads to a boss fight that makes you realize that you have to adapt to counteract an aggressive pattern (one could think of a forgiving Dark Souls, ahead of its time, or a 2D PoP).
It might not suit everyone after the balmy tale of The Sands of Time, but Warrior Within is still a memorable sequel considering the good aspects mentioned by others, which make me forget the negatives !
Warrior Within has a fantastic story and one or two brilliant plot twists. Nonetheless, the biggest issue is that in the second half of the game, it starts to drag on, as nothing really interesting happens and you mostly visit locations you have already navigated once or twice. This is a common complaint. Also the combat tends to become unfair and more chore-like the more you progress.
The game world is designed to be semi-open. Unfortunately, sometimes you just don't know where to go. This is also a very common complaint. It also leads to unevenly placed save points, which also replenish your health. Between lengthy sections, there might be additional checkpoints, but those often turn out to be quite useless when you have only little life points left.
There are some pathological sections, which are just frustrating, and unfortunately, there are no cheats and you can't change the difficulty level mid game.
On the other hand, WW has few, but great boss battles! They are infuriating. But great.
Apropos combat: the Prince has a *huge* selection of combos, which is quite overwhelming, and I am still unsure if that's a pro or con. In reality, you only need a handful of those, and the lengthier ones are quite useless, anyway. But their timing feels really off.
Most of the time it's way easier and less time consuming to just abuse some overpowered attack moves. But it's quite common that the Prince behaves in unexpected ways *because* he is so agile and many of his moves are context dependent. Yeah, a feature can be so great that it becomes it's own biggest weakness.
Apart from struggling with bad camera angles, acrobatics feel great, and avoiding traps is a lot more challenging.
But what I really miss are the puzzles and distinct rooms from SoT. It should be mentioned that WW's tone is much more darker and not a-thousand-and-one-night like.
This is my favorite Prince of Persia, it has the best combat system in the franchise(a little better than TT), freedom to return to areas already passed in order to get missing items(nearly from a metroidvania game) ; the puzzles and platforms are as good as in SoT and TT.
Also feature some "scape from Dahaka" parts. It's something like pass platform parts as fast as you can with the sensation of being chased.
The graphic style is dark, the darkest in the franchise, it doesn't resemble the arabian nights but the ancient Persia.
The music is like a mix between persian music with heavy metal.
The story is stupid, but the story never was the strong point of the franchise.
The boss fights are not as good as the ones in TT, but are better than the ones in SoT.
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