Posted on: January 14, 2011
Curunauth
Владелец игрыИгр: 1226 Отзывов: 23
Quick, Pretty, And Easy (mostly)
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.
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