I never played the original Prince of Persia games so long ago, but I was nevertheless interested when I heard that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (PoP) was under development. Why, you ask? Because the whole swashbuckling, acrobatic, adventure tale with a strong middle eastern flavor really appealed to me. I figured it would be as close as I would likely get to gaming The Arabian Nights, a set of literary adventures that I have never forgotten from my childhood. My father read some of those stories to me, along with a host of Kipling tales, and I have fond memories of them.
Unfortunately, the demo almost put me off PoP forever. Regular readers know that I positively despise console interfaces in PC games, and PoP has one of the worst I've ever seen. More awful still is its camera control which, to put it very charitably, is horribly flawed. I came away from the demo very impressed by the graphics and in love with the game's style and panache, but I was also terribly put off by the dismal console camera and controls. It was only because I ran across a used copy at Electronics Boutique that I purchased it; I figured for $12 I couldn't go wrong.
PoP is the first game I've seen that uses shader technology to give the entire look a soft, almost dreamy feel. The result is as beautiful as it is stylish. No other game quite has the look of PoP, and it's definitely a look worth having. The artwork is as wonderfully fluid as the animation. Even though the environments and characters look a bit cartoonish from time to time—almost like something one might expect if Disney had made an animated feature of it—I'm surprised at myself with the degree to which I really enjoy the visuals.
The texture work is nicely done, the environments and character modeling are first rate, and the animation is positively superb. Every one of the prince's moves looks absolutely spot on, completely over the top, which is quite appropriate for the game's overall style. Literally half the fun of the game is watching the prince flex his acrobatic muscles, which makes it all the more disappointing that the camera control is so awful (about which more will follow).
But if the elements mentioned thus far are compelling, it is surely the special effects and cinematics that take the cake. The in-game special effects are incredibly dramatic at times, featuring wild camera swooping and panning worthy of something on the silver screen. Seriously, every time I visited the magic fountain I had to gaze in awe and wonder at the surroundings. And the cut scene in-game cinematic when the prince drinks from the magic fountain reminds me of something straight out of Hollywood. It's that good.
I should also observe that PoP has a few pre-rendered cinematic sequences that are absolutely brilliant and powerful. I wasn't expecting some of the events in the game, and one of the cinematics near the end of the game in particular touched me deeply. I wouldn't say they're bleeding edge in their fidelity, but I will say that their emotional impact is pretty impressive.
Suffice it to say that I am absolutely enamored of the visuals for PoP. My only complaint, in fact, is that the faces aren't lip-synched with the dialogue. I realize I'm nit-picking, but it really broke the illusion for me when I would hear the prince talking during a close-up on his face without any expression or lip movement whatsoever. Like I've said before, gaming visuals are getting to the point where it's those little details that really take one out of the moment. It's not a major complaint, but it is something I would like to see corrected in the inevitable sequel.
The audio in PoP is frustrating. The music is fabulous, the sound effects are pretty good, and the voice acting is very nicely done. But I could never get a decent balance of the three no matter what I did. And I think it was due to the game's positional audio. It seemed like every time the prince or Farah would say something, I would have to strain to hear them. I could turn down the music and sound effects, of course, but then I would have to crank the volume on my speaker system to make everything work. Every time I did that, I would inevitably discover it only after I had launched some other game, application, etc. that would shake the very walls! I eventually gave up.
I'm suspicious of the positional audio because it seemed like the problem was far worse when the camera was pulled back from the characters. I realize that positional audio means that audio is positioned properly in 3D space. But I think the developers should have done something to ensure that the dialogue was enhanced, or something similar, so that the user can hear it even when the camera is pulled back. It's practically impossible to play the game with the camera in close, so it's not like the developers could have failed to notice the softness of dialogue.
Aside from that complaint, though, the audio is very well done. It's clearly well implemented and lends a lot to the game.
Here's where things go straight into the toilet. The interface is a God-awful nightmare lifted from a console. Even worse, it feels like it probably didn't work very well on the console from which it was lifted in the first place. The controls are simple, insofar as movement directions are limited to forward, backward, left, and right. But the camera is always positioned at such a screwy angle—when it isn't crammed into a wall or jerking around wildly—that it frequently isn't clear at all which key one should press to move in the desired direction. I've killed the prince literally dozens of times simply because I thought I was going to jump one direction and actually jumped in another.
And I don't think it's really possible for me to overstate just how terrible the camera really is. PoP is a game that often requires split-second timing and perfect reactions at the controls in order to achieve the necessary stunts or combat moves. But the camera shifts around without warning, gets stuck at terrible and useless angles, and jitters or jerks much of the time while in combat. Honestly, I don't know what the developers were thinking; the camera in PoP is the worst hunk of crap I have ever seen in a game. Period.
Fortunately the menu system is functional, the key binding stuff is generally acceptable, and the interface is sufficiently context sensitive to make most of the prince's moves possible with an exceedingly economical number of keybinds. The one awful exception is the combat interface. Although the dagger of time has a woefully limited number of special powers, activating them requires the oddest use of keystrokes. It's as if the developers couldn't get past the notion that hitting the rewind key had to figure into every special move. Sheesh.
Why the developers chose to use the same keys that are already used for other things (e.g., merely tapping the rewind key to slow time) is utterly beyond me. More than once I screwed up trying to activate a power simply because I got the key combination wrong. It would have made much more sense to let the player select powers ahead of time (ala Diablo) and activate them as needed, or just bind them to separate keys or key combinations. Anything would have been better than what they did.
Those comments aside, the rest of the interface works. The various elements of the heads-up display (HUD) take quite a bit of getting used to, or at least they did for me, but they are ultimately quite functional once the player logs some time with the game.
The game mechanics rise to the heights of brilliance and the depths of stupidity, though usually at different times. On the plus side, the game mechanics of the prince's acrobatics are positively fabulous. Their context-sensitive simplicity gets the job done so beautifully it's hard to imagine how they could possibly be improved. Controlling the prince is a thing of pure joy; exultation in his dexterity is usually a mere keystroke or two away.
The mechanics of opening the various grates, doors, etc. also lend an interesting twist to the whole affair. The prince is frequently under the gun, trying to get from point A to point B as the clock ticks, while at other times it's quite a challenge just to figure out how to trip a given pressure plate. It makes for a fun and challenging experience in creative acrobatics much of the time.
Yet the greatest mistake in the game is a serious one, namely, the absolutely terrible camera control. PoP is one of those games that gives you left, right, forward, and backward for movement options but then insists on showing you the prince from an angle precisely 27.34° off the mark from whatever is needed. Seriously, the view shifts and cavorts around so nonsensically sometimes that it seems almost like the developers are deliberately trying to confuse the player.
So even though the actual mechanics of controlling the prince are beautiful, they're horrifically complicated, imprecise, and just plain impossible at times because of the terrible camera control. During combat, for example, when it's most crucial to control the prince precisely, the camera will rattle wildly between two different views when he's backing up or in a tight spot, making it exceedingly difficult to accomplish anything other than getting killed.
This is only exacerbated by the annoying way the game insists on surrounding you with creatures at all times during combat. If the prince runs too far from the main battle, the sand creatures will simply teleport near him. So more often than not he's stuck in the thick of things with three to four opponents crowding him. This wouldn't be so bad were it not for the awful camera control, but it ends up getting him killed far too often. And once he's hit and down, it seems like every creature nearby starts swinging, the result of which being that the prince either uses the dagger of time to back up or dies.
True, the prince has far superior agility and, as such, can hit multiple opponents in multiple directions with time left to spare. But time isn't the problem. The problem is that the combination of the control scheme with the awful camera control makes it next to impossible to target creatures reliably. If I could reliably target which creature I wanted to go after, then I'm sure I could cope with such close-up brawls. But as things stand it's exceedingly difficult to control precisely in which direction the prince will strike. In short, combat ends up being as irritating as the control/camera combo is sloppy.
There are also some truly nasty spots where the prince can get stuck with his back against a wall and cannot get away. The fight in the mess hall comes to mind, as do a couple of others. When the player gets stuck in a corner like that, there's literally nothing that can be done. The creatures will crowd around and just start hitting the prince until he's dead. If the player has the further bad fortune to be unable to back up far enough using the dagger of time, then the retry feature or re-loading from the last save point are the only real options.
Speaking of which, the addition of the dagger of time's rewind feature is very neat. It goes a long way toward minimizing my later complaint about save points, letting the prince fix little errors without much trouble. I don't see how this particular mechanic would make sense in too many other games, but it works wonderfully in PoP, giving the player a way to fix stupid mistakes without having to sit and wait for a game to reload.
To return to the negatives, the biggest missed opportunity of the game is arguably the mechanics of combat. The prince has a few different special moves and a few special powers granted by the dagger of time, but combat mostly comes down to the same old thing over and over and over. It's fun for a while, but it grows progressively more stale over time. A selection of different combat moves, combos, or other such features would have made the game a true diamond in the rough, but as it is combat is largely drudgery.
And finally, my age-old complaint against console-ish games applies here as well: the bloody thing has no quick-save feature. The player is stuck with the save points pre-programmed into the game. And believe me when I say that there need to be quite a few more in some critical spots. I hated playing through a few of the areas a half a dozen times or more until I got things exactly right and could continue. Those save points are too few and too far between for some of the nasty combat encounters in this game.
The game minimizes this somewhat by carving the maps up into somewhat finer chunks as long as the game is loaded. That is, during long sequences or difficult fights it's usually possible to retry from somewhere nearer the current point than the last save point, but this lasts only as long as the player remains in the game. If he has to leave for any reason, he'll have to start again from the last save point instead. And that can be pretty irritating.
The story is actually somewhat unusual as far as video games are concerned. The prince accidentally releases the sands of time, a plot element which isn't so unusual in itself, but the way the rest of the story plays out is pretty neat. When the prince is forced to fight and destroy his own father it's a pretty touching moment. Similarly, saving Farah is a nice bit. It's obvious the two of them will grow only closer, but the way it all unfolds is worthwhile. It's not Shakespeare, and it doesn't even live up to a Kipling tale, but as video games go it's good enough. The overall result is a tale of two people caught up in awful events, who come to abandon their arrogance in exchange for love by the end.
As such, the story is sweet, charming, and highly unusual given the seemingly endless tendency toward all that is "dark" and "edgy". There's something of a plot twist toward the end, with one of the most emotionally powerful pre-rendered cinematics I've ever seen, and it caught me completely off guard. So although the story is really pretty simple taken as a whole, it does a better than average job at sucking the player into the game. I actually look forward to the next chapter in the prince's exploits because of the potential character development; how unusual is that?!
In terms of content, PoP has some good stuff but comes up a bit short. Many of the environments are quite similar, so there isn't a big variation there. And there are but a few different types of enemies that one will face in the game, so there isn't a big variation there either. Perhaps worst of all, the game is pretty short. I finished the entire single-player campaign in about twelve hours, and I got stuck on the puzzles pretty frequently. If I play through it a second time (or possessed pretty much anything resembling a clue for puzzle games during my first attempt) I would likely finish it in a mere handful of hours.
While I'm on the subject, the creature artificial intelligence (AI) is barely functional. Yet because the control scheme is so awful, this is actually a good thing. As it is the enemies are barely recognizable as such; i.e., they're really that slow and stupid. But were they any more competent the game would be almost impossible. Because they will teleport near the player if he tries to run away, and because the game has a nasty habit of spawning them right next to the player at the outset of fights, it's hard enough as it is to avoid getting knocked down and creamed. Because of the limitations of the control scheme, the prince will be hard pressed not to be killed outright if he's knocked down and surrounded.
The real special bulk of the game, of course, is the puzzles. And I do have to admit that they scale nicely. The puzzles in the early game are pretty easy, but they grow progressively more difficult. Just as I was getting the hang of the different moves, they introduced the need to move objects around. And then as that was getting old, I had to figure out how to use such objects to jump to this or that object. Once I retrieved the sword above the baths I had to deal with the conceptual shift of being able to smash through weakened walls. The introduction of new and different bits is very well timed. By the end of the game, I thought nothing of racing along walls, flipping from poles to walls and back, jumping back and forth up opposing walls, racing along collapsing platforms, and some incredibly tricky trap-dodging moves as well. All of this makes PoP a huge change from the games I normally play, and I found it very refreshing.
In summary, there are a number of different and interesting puzzles, some interesting and definitely beautiful environments, traps, combat, and other worthwhile elements. The game is a bit short for my taste, but what there is of it is fun while one's tolerance for the awful controls endures. If only combat didn't suck compared to what it could be, the game would be a breakaway hit.
Given that there is no multi-player aspect to the game, there is little to say here. Perhaps if the game had involved a more intricate combat system it would have been possible to craft some kind of prince vs. sand demons game mode. I can think of a few neat possibilities, but the combat system sucks badly enough in the single-player game. I'm actually glad the developers didn't foist the same weak system on us in a useless multi-player aspect as well.
Overall the game is a lot of fun despite its warts. I found that if I played it in small doses, just an hour or so at a time, I could have fun with it and not lose my temper completely over its screwy shortcomings. Given the relatively short length of the game, that's actually a good thing anyway, insofar as it helps spread the experience over a number of days.
In the final analysis I can't broadly recommend the game. But if you're a gamer to whom acrobatic puzzles appeal, and who likes a good balance of relatively simplistic combat here and there, then PoP would be a good buy for you. Just be sure to take its terrible console interface and awful camera control into account. If you don't have any patience or at least tolerance for such warts, you'll be hard pressed to get anything positive out of PoP. If you find some of the combat encounters as frustrating and ridiculous as I did, download a trainer for the game and use it; it will help you keep your sanity. I used it for only two of the situations in the game, but I'm glad I did.
So, for those like me, who can put up with a little crap here and there or are willing to use a cheat, PoP is a good buy if it can be obtained pretty cheaply. I spent a whopping $12 on a used copy, and I feel like I've definitely got my money's worth. I'll probably even play through it again at least once if I can stand the control scheme for another run through. The environmental puzzles are just that much fun.
12/07/2004