I can't believe to this day that there isn't more to this game considering the subtitle. I mean, really; An Ancient Epic, that is mastered in 2 hours and over in 5. One of the weirdest things about this game is the combo system. The three hit combo keeps count, so if you end your combo on the 2nd hit, the next combo starts with the 3rd hit animation. As for originality, that's about it. This is a pretty standard Prince of Persia/Tomb Raider Legend/Uncharted style affair where platforming is more about noticing which direction to go in than in executing jumps to get there. The difficulty comes from some rather wonky magnet points in certain places which sell the idea the game cares about your precision, but it quickly drops the pretence after every ramp up in difficulty. Shovelware, such as this is, wastes the majority of your time fighting waves of enemies in closed off arenas. It's boring top-down ARPG combat with the aforementioned strange combo mechanic in tow. As you progress through the epic journey, you gather abilities and immediately need to use them efficiently to dispatch the accompanying stronger and more evasive enemies. Combat starts out ok, and quickly becomes a chore. You do get a couple of boss fights iirc. and there are collectibles hidden about the levels to make it slightly more fun than the stubby linear excursion itself would be on it's own. Storywise, it's a rescue mission, which sees your character chasing a kindnapped sibling through various environments, all the while discovering powerups from Hindu gods. It's fine I guess. In conclusion, Raji is crap. It's one of those think tank funded 'indies' with a clear flippancy to it that comes from whether they are hitting the actionables in their funding agreement rather than making a game that kicks balls and blows people away with how funny or awesome it is. Highly skippable
This adventure needed more QA. I got softlocked and had to restart a chapter on more than one occasion. The first happened after I'd just done the first timing puzzle, so I approached the next the same way and got stuck. At multiple times things just break, usually something that needs to activated or toggled doesn't change its state and you end up having to restart. If restarting just to make progress wasn't annoying enough, there isn't much more incentive as the in-game extras also don't work. I assume they are pictures of concept art; they don't work for me. Given that I've tried to get into this game 3 separate times and have always managed to bore myself into quitting after a couple of hours, perhaps it's obvious why this review is so negative.
I started with TLR (TR4), and made it about 2/3 the way through before running into unfinished content. It's like Lara runs down an alley and the world slides back 3 generations or 25 years in fidelity in an instant. Reportedly, Chronicles isn't as bad; I wouldn't know. And reportedly AoD is still janky; again, I wouldn't know. And reportedly people like me "should be patient" and "wait for a patch." I was once paid money to beta test games in active development. TLR needs some people like me in dev and QA to polish this. Aside from the small issue of the game shipping half a year ahead of being ready for market, the game is also lit flatly. It lacks volumetric effects in many places, and because textures are lit by light sources rather than illuminated per object, the world appears dark or washed out or grey depending on how much light is present. The original design popped, with light and dark being used to convey all sorts of information to the player. In these remasters, much of this design language is lost. If I had a magic wand and the inclination to fix this effort, I'd take all the upscaled assets and import them into the original lighting engine so that we can see some contrast in the game world again. I'd also sort out Lara's model which is sorely lacking hips and resembles a prefect/hall monitor rather than an athletic woman. The scope for how good IV-VI could be is capped at a 4 for me, as they'll never revisit their design stage and address the lighting problem. A real pity and missed opportunity.
The negatives stand out though the theme, graphics, sound FX and orchestral music are top notch; it falls flat on basically everything else. The story is a classic - the god of decay has corrupted the land and is about to escape from prison leaving you to restore the land one zone at a time. Your companion is key to the plot but little changes throughout the adventure and the twists come as no surprise. Its also unfinished, this being the 13,372,805th game which ends on a cliffhanger. Thoughtfully, the real ending was ripped from the game and packaged as the world's 525,858,542nd DLC and features no tangible changes and another subtly different cliffhanger. NPC Characterisation fairs a little better insofar as there is some - you find out about the world and your companion through conversations, then grow to hate her as she flirts with settling on one of the personalities she'd read genuine people had. The prince also flipflops between personas and while scenes are congruous in isolation, I challenge you to drink every time you fail to predict the tone of a cutscene before it plays out and see if you can render the game challenging through insobriety. Gameplay is mostly traversal - it's ok, but its slow and stiff with constant interruptions to pace due to the prince 'catching' Elika when she catches up. Your glove slows descent and can't be released so you grind down every wall. There are some nice touches like the vertical poles which flip you 180 and the rings to extend wall runs, but the supermove pads are nonsense and bounce you around the levels arbitrarily. Combat is frustratingly basic and riddled with quicktime events and randomness, and finally, there are 3 very simple linear algebra puzzles in the game. Overall, PoP is weak. It's not terrible despite the above whinge-fest - it just suffers from a low skill ceiling that doesn't allow for faster or more risky play - it's like a safe, on-rails ride without the candyfloss and queues.
