Like I said in my review of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (PoP), I never played the original Prince of Persia game so many years ago, but this didn't stop me from enjoying PoP. In fact, I've just recently played through it a third time as a prelude to playing the sequel, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (PoP2), and I had more fun on my third trip through than I did the previous two times. That just how it goes with me and certain games it seems.
So I dove into PoP2 fresh from the high of completing PoP again, expecting more of the same magic that made the first game great. While PoP2 does improve upon its predecessor in several ways, it's also a radically different game in several respects. Gone are the happy days of the original. As a Penny Arcade cartoon captures so perfectly, using quite a bit of vulgar language I should warn my reader, the prince now "smolders with generic rage". It's not really clear what has pissed him off so badly, though I suppose being pursued by the Dahaka would ruin anyone's day.
The visuals of PoP2 take two steps forward and one step back. In the forward direction one finds improved environment textures, even more fluid animations for the prince and the various enemies, stunningly beautiful special effects at times, more detailed pre-rendered cinematics, lip-synching of characters' mouths to dialogue, and so forth. There are a few problems here and there, about which more in a moment, but overall the characters and environments have clearly benefited from an upgrade in terms of polygon counts.
What leaps out at me as a big step backward, however, is the entire change in theme. I realize that the general trend in video games, movies, television, etc. is toward "darker", "edgier" characters and situations. In some cases I even welcome it. But no small part of the magic of the original game was found in the bright, beautiful locations, in the charming banter between the prince and Farah, etc. Yes, PoP2 is more "realistic" in that it doesn't look nearly so much like an animated cartoon as PoP, but the change in tone is quite unwelcome on the whole. Whereas PoP had a soft, dreamy, fairy-tale quality to its look, PoP2's artistic sensibilities are closer to a sort of nihilistic vomiting.
Still less forgivable, to my mind at least, is the way this change in tone detracts from the game. Much of the game involves navigating complicated sequences of environmental puzzles. As such, being able to distinguish all the salient details of the game's environments is crucial to being able to play. Whereas PoP was consistently bright enough to let the player quickly sort out the various features of his current location, the overall darkness of the artwork in PoP2 makes it much harder to pick things out. That's not helpful at all when trying to time a wall-run-and-jump move.
Change of tone aside, the developers also failed to be consistent in the quality of their work. Whereas the prince himself looks pretty good, as do the environments and effects, some of the characters are rough to say the least. In one particular cut-scene, I almost winced at how ugly Shadhee's prominently featured booted feet were. If you're going to scrimp on the polygons and texture quality, developers, don't give us close ups where you do! The textures on Kaileena weren't much better either. Frankly, I think the prince and Farah from PoP looked better.
Overall, while the game looks quite good in several respects, I don't think it's as pleasing to the eye as PoP. It does run very well, even at 1600 x 1200 x 32 bpp with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering, but that doesn't alleviate the burdens imposed by the thematic darkness. I can play any number of first-person shooters if I want to run through dark, edgy, steam-punk environments; the Prince of Persia franchise should stay true to its exotic, adventure oriented roots.
Much like the visuals, the audio is a mixed bag. On the one hand, some of the sound effects are even better than the previous game. The sounds of swords clashing, the tearing of parts from a golem's head, the environmental effects, etc. are all very well done. PoP2 doesn't have the best audio effects I've ever heard, but some of them are quite good. I'll say more later about a specific complaint against combat sounds.
I'm also happy to say that the voice acting is good. I think much of the dialogue is ridiculous, particularly the sadomasochistic comments by the ninja-like female enemies, but at least it's well acted. Personally, I would prefer quite a different approach to the dialogue, but I suppose one should be thankful; after all, said dialogue could have been ridiculous and poorly performed to boot.
Perhaps the best illustration of uneven audio is the music. When the prince is just wandering through the environments, he is often accompanied by some of the more beautiful music I've heard. The plaintive notes of the piano speak of sorrow and loss, the prince's demons haunting the listener. I absolutely love some of those tracks. Yet when combat begins, the player is assaulted by the lowest-common-denominator sort of heavy metal imaginable. The contrast could not be more jarring.
PoP enjoyed tastefully appropriate music throughout. From the very opening pre-rendered cinematic, to the climatic final battle, to the end of the credits, it was all great. PoP2, in contrast, is a big let down. I have no idea what the developers must have been thinking. All I can tell you is that I would pay good money to replace those awful combat music tracks with something more appropriate.
When I reviewed PoP, I had plenty of negative things to say about the interface, all of which can be summarized by saying that the terrible confusion between the camera and the controls makes the game a nightmare to play at times. I'm sorry to say that PoP2 not only fails to fix this, it actually makes it worse! Unbelievably, I had a harder time playing PoP2 than I did PoP, which is an unforgivable step backwards.
Let me recap the basic problem before I explain. The movement keys, WASD by default, are relative to the camera's view. So as long as the camera is directly behind the prince, pressing the "forward" key will move him forward. If the camera is looking at the prince from the front instead, then said key makes him back pedal instead. This by itself is reasonably straightforward for a third-person perspective game with a dynamic view.
The problem arises because the camera is absolutely terrible. I would swear that the developers deliberately wrote code so that the camera will never let the direction keys move the prince where he needs to go. I can't even tell you how many times I've tried to run up a wall, only to run alongside it over a ledge to my doom instead. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to dodge under a trap of some sort, only to find the prince dodging stupidly into the wall and getting caught in it. I can't tell you how many times I've tried jumping off a platform in one direction, only to find that the prince has just leaped the other way to his death.
But all of that was the same with PoP. That's nothing new. After a while one comes to find ways of coping with the situation, and one learns to use the sand tanks to rewind time and avoid the inevitable errors. The reasons I say PoP2 exacerbates the situation are that (1) the prince has far fewer sand tanks, and thus far fewer opportunities for error, and, more important, (2) the camera sometimes get stuck in places that literally make it impossible even to see the prince!
During the "Clockworks and Gears" section of the game, for example, the camera locked itself several times below the wooden floor on which the prince was fighting. No matter how I frantically moved the mouse around, it made no difference. Oh, I could hit 'Q' to activate the so-called "landscape camera", but that wasn't any better: a couple of beams were blocking my view from that direction, so I literally couldn't see the prince at all from any camera angle! That's absolutely unforgivable.
And as if errors like that weren't bad enough, I catalogued a list of minor camera problems that would choke a camel. Sometimes it would get spun all the way around in one direction, forcing the player to figure out which way the camera had been stuck in order to free it. This may not sound like a big deal, but try fighting a bunch of bad guys when the camera is stuck looking at the prince in an extreme close-up from the front. It doesn't work very well.
At other times, the camera would shake or shudder between two points, particularly when the prince was backing up, and it was still more annoying that I could look only at the prince from weird angles in a plethora of tight spots. That kind of awful camera control makes it extremely difficult to get past many of the traps in the game without taking a whole bunch of damage. And with fewer sand tanks, as mentioned already, PoP2 is a non-stop reloading fest at points.
As before, I have to admit that 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. I do wish that this game allowed the prince to switch to using a single weapon without getting rid of the second, but that's not a fatal flaw.
What does count as a final, fatal, interface flaw is the continuing, stupid reuse of keys already bound to other things! For example, there are a couple of moves in the game that require the player to hit the rewind key in conjunction with another. While these moves would probably be useful, it simply isn't worth the risk of accidentally triggering a rewind instead. As with PoP, it would make 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.
To continue the overall theme, the game mechanics are also a source of both joy and pain. First, the joy. A minor enhancement from the previous game is the way the prince can slide down tapestries, run back and forth along walls using ropes, and so forth. This prince has a few more moves, and, while their addition is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, they're a lot of fun. The major joys found in PoP2 definitely come from exulting in the prince's acrobatic talents.
Second, the developers also deserve a great deal of credit for adding so much depth to the combat mechanics. This time around the prince can dual-wield effectively, though the player won't always want to do so because brandishing a single weapon has some distinct advantages. I rather liked both styles of play, whether I was using single-weapon techniques to saw enemies in half quickly, using nearby enemies as a meat shield, or just mixing it up with some spectacular dual-weapon combos. Add to this a healthy supply of acrobatic moves (e.g., jumping over opponents while attacking them, wall jumping into battle, swinging round a pole in a circular wheel of death, etc.), and it's hard to tell that PoP2 is the ancestor of the woefully simplistic PoP.
Third, and finally in the plus column, the developers fixed at least one über-annoying issue from PoP: enemies no longer magically teleport into close proximity with the prince! The hardest part of dealing with combat in PoP, aside from the terrible camera control, was that the prince could very easily get backed into a corner and killed very quickly. PoP2 doesn't have that awful teleporting nonsense, so combat is far more interesting.
Unfortunately, there are as many negatives as positives (if not, in fact, more). For starters, the prince has far fewer sand tanks, as mentioned already, the result of which is that the game is horribly complicated and difficult in spots. A second minor complaint is that secondary weapons are fun to use but terribly irritating because they're seemingly made out of tissue paper. Seriously, secondary weapons start to degrade after just a couple of strikes. I've had the prince go through two or more secondary weapons in a single fight, all because they keep breaking on him. I guess the developers were trying to encourage the player to pick up and use lots of different weapons, but a far better way to do that is to make the different sorts of weapons more interesting, not have them fall apart after a few strokes!
Far worse, though, are the mechanics of saving and retrying. The game can be saved only when drinking from a fountain. This in itself wouldn't be so bad, but the game seems to provide fewer opportunities to save than PoP, and the game is definitely too slow to bring up the menu in the first place. Here's how it works. The prince runs to a fountain and starts to drink, and he drinks, and he drinks, and he drinks, and he drinks, and he drinks—I've literally counted as many as five drinks from the fountain—before the menu appears. It makes saving a real headache.
If that's only an annoyance, or perhaps a poor decision, what I'm about to say is unconscionably stupid: the game isn't any finer grained than those few save points! At least in PoP, when the player died a long way from the last save point, the game's retry feature would typically start somewhere far closer to the player's current position. That was still irritating, mind you, but it did help smooth things out a bit. PoP2, in contrast, forces the player always to retry from his last save! Again to illustrate using the "Clockworks and Gears" section of the game, there comes a point where the prince must make his way through a series of tough traps before he comes to a save point, after which he heads into a long and difficult path.
To explain, he runs down some stairs, faces three non-trivial enemies, then faces two more of the same enemies on the catwalk above, turns left to face two exploding enemies—they explode on death, making it very hard to avoid taking a bunch of damage—goes through several tricky traps to unlock some artwork, turns back around, faces another couple of enemies, runs through some mechanical stuff to fight a couple more enemies, has to run through a fast-moving wheel, has to time a wall-run-and-jump perfectly in a dark room without any clear visual cues, navigates some columns, throws a switch, does another wall run followed by wall jumping back and forth up to the ledge above.
And, after he's gone through hell and back in that area, what does he get for his troubles? An encounter with one of the game's huge golems when he probably has little to no health and likely one sand tank! I don't mind difficulty; I like a challenge. But I was forced to restart that area again and again and again and again. I'm not sure exactly how many times I had to reload the game to make it through there, but I do know that I had to reload from my previous save no less than thirty-four times after I started counting! I played that lone section of the game for nearly two hours before I got past it.
And it's not like there's any good way to make it easier. Eventually I figured out I could backtrack to the original fountain and restore the prince's health, which seemed to help at first, but it didn't matter much in the long run; whenever I died, the game respawned all of the enemies I had already faced! In short, that section of the game was stupidly difficult, and I was playing the game on the normal setting. I can't even imagine what it must be like on the hard difficulty level.
In short summary, the game mechanics of PoP2 seem designed from the ground up to steal the player's fun. The gameplay I loved from PoP lies under the surface, to be sure, but the player has to fight through an awful lot of crap along the way to enjoy it.
The premise of the story is hackneyed, but it does have at least one neat element. It's the old and terribly overdone must-travel-back-in-time-to-prevent-something claptrap that powered The Terminator film, more TV science fiction than I can count, and God alone knows how many other stories. The neat element, to my mind at least, is the idea that some monstrous guardian of the timeline is after the prince for unleashing the sands of time in PoP. That adds a worthwhile twist.
The problem is that the story of PoP helped make it great, whereas the story of PoP2 simply isn't interesting enough to drive the action by comparison. Sure, the prince wants to travel back in time to stop the sands of time from being made, but it isn't clear to me at all as he jumps back and forth through time how the things he's doing in the past connect with things in the future. I know it's supposed to be due to cause and effect, but the game's focus is so squarely on puzzles and combat that the story just gets lost.
Finally, the prince simply doesn't grow or develop as a character this time around. Watching his transformation from spoiled brat to noble man in the first game was wonderful. Seeing him open his heart and mind to Farah was wonderful. All I saw in PoP2 was a never ending stream of over-the-top teen angst and stupid and off-putting one-liners. Again, the whole I-smolder-with-generic-rage description sums it up perfectly. It's as if the prince's character growth in PoP has been undone entirely and then some.
In the plus column, PoP2 is significantly longer than PoP. Whereas I can finish the latter in a single-digit's worth of hours of play, I spent more than that much time in the former and hadn't yet made it halfway through. Of course, a lot of that time was spent in pure frustration, playing and replaying sequences, but even still there's clearly more game to PoP2 than there was in PoP.
Also in the plus column is that the player gets to see the same locales as they were in the past and are in the present. There are some problems with this, about which more in a moment, but it's also surprisingly neat to see all the changes between an area's glory days and its ruined present. The down side to this is that running through the same areas over and over can't help but get boring. I was sick and tired of running around the towers by the time I got out of them. It feels like the developers send the player back and forth so many times merely to avoid having to craft more content for a longer game.
The biggest disappointment with the game, for me at least, is its combat. True, the developers deserve praise for adding a rich set of acrobatics and fighting moves, but the vast number of such things simply don't make combat compelling. I couldn't see any substantive reason for preferring the combo unleashed by triple clicking compared to the combo unleashed by quadruple clicking. A couple of the dual-wielding moves are pretty neat, but most are largely indistinguishable from the others. My all time favorite game, Blade of Darkness, does a far better job of providing the player with meaningfully different and useful moves. In PoP2, many of them feel like they're in the game purely for sake of numbers.
Adding to the lameness of combat is the way the bulk of the game's enemies fare. True, their artificial intelligence (AI) is generally improved over PoP, but hitting them feels like whacking a bunch of connected, animate sandbags. Why? Because they make these stupid, screeching sounds—almost like some weird cross between a cat's wailing and hitting a bag of flour—and seem like punching bags until they fall apart. The first half a dozen times the prince slices a bad guy, it will seem as if he's just slapped a young girl's doll, but then the next stroke will take the creature's head off in gouts of blood before the whole body disappears in a puff of golden sand.
It just doesn't make sense; it just isn't believable. I realize this is a video game. We're not talking about something that can happen in the real world. But the net effect is just freakishly schizophrenic. I mean, these are supposedly flesh and blood bad guys, which is obvious from the blood that spews everywhere when cutting off their heads, but they seem like rag dolls that fall apart into glowing sand when hit enough times. The basic problem is that combat just doesn't seem like combat; it feels more like some Super Turbo Ragdoll-Pillow Whacker arcade machine.
It doesn't help either that the boss sequences aren't exactly inspired. In the very first area the player has to face off against Shadhee, one of the empress of time's minions, and she's unbeatable until one figures out the trick. Until the player starts blocking she'll cut him down in seconds. Once he starts blocking she can't do him any damage. The big "battle" with her amounts to (1) waiting until she stops swinging, (2) getting in a few good licks before she starts up again, and (3) repeating for minutes until she falls. That's just dull. Heck, the developers even included a lame click-fest bit when she crosses swords up close with the player; i.e., their swords cross and the player has to click the mouse button madly to "win" the clinch. It's as pathetic as it is uninteresting. That's the kind of button mashing better left to silly console games.
I should also add that the Dahaka sequences are nothing like what they could have been. Imagine fleeing for your life from an unstoppable killing machine, as in the opening pre-rendered cinematic. I can imagine how that could be really exciting when translated into a game. But the way PoP2 handles it, it's painful drudgery instead. Here's the way my first encounter with the Dahaka went: the Dahaka showed up, I hesitated for maybe a quarter of a second, and the Dahaka killed me instantly.
I'm sad to say it didn't get any better. The second time I didn't hesitate, but he killed me when I took too long to turn a corner instead. Then it was while I was wall-running. Then it was because I fouled the jump at the end of the wall-run. Then it was because I took a misstep on the next platform. In short, I had to retry from the last save point nearly a dozen times to execute the sequence of steps flawlessly and avoid instant death. What could have been a terrifying and exciting chase turned into punishing, rote trial and error until I got it exactly right.
And paradoxically enough, the resulting chase sequences are too short to be interesting for what they are! The Dahaka shows up for mere seconds at a time, probably because expecting the player to complete a longer sequence perfectly is a bit much. I would have much preferred the Dahaka sequences to be more forgiving and longer. As things stand, they're just irritating.
I should also add that navigating the environments in general, and finding the life upgrades in specific, is made far more difficult than in PoP because of the darker theme in PoP2. Frankly, I didn't even know there were any life upgrades until I downloaded a guide to help me through the game when I got stuck. I'll grant that finding them was arguably too trivial in PoP—gee, that wall looks a bit funny; whatever could that mean?—but I haven't a clue how anyone found them in PoP2. I never did find one on my own, which only complicates the game all the more when the prince has so little health. I usually find most of the secrets in any given game, but I found none of them in PoP2. That tells me that either (1) I've got some kind of mental block with PoP2, or (2) they're just too well hidden.
All things considered, there's more content in PoP2 than in PoP. The problem is that the sequel brings a host of new problems to the table. Yes, it has a deeper combat system, but it ultimately isn't much more satisfying. Yes, it fixes problems with creature AI, but fighting them isn't much fun for people who don't like repeatedly whacking rag dolls. Yes, the Dahaka is a big scary beast chasing the prince, but running into him is a purely frustrating exercise in trial and error. There are things to like, but they're all flawed in one way or another.
Sadly, a solid multi-player mode might have saved PoP2, but it has nothing along these lines. Rune is still the best multi-player, melee combat game ever made. Perhaps if a sequel to PoP2 comes along we'll finally get to test the prince's skills against other humans.
You know, I don't normally review a game I haven't finished for a pretty simple reason: I want to make sure I have given it a fair shot. There are only a couple of games I've reviewed that I never finished, Black & White being the least fun of all. PoP2 isn't nearly that bad, but the simple truth is that games ought to be fun! If a game isn't fun right from the outset, I try to give it a fair shot; i.e., I read some guides, change my approach, etc. With PoP2, though, it just wasn't worth it. The joys just weren't worth the corresponding pains.
In the final analysis I can't think of anyone to whom I can broadly recommend this game. I loved PoP, and there are quite a few things I like about PoP2 as well, but its flaws are just too numerous, its punishment level is just too high. I have precious little free time to play as it is, so when a game screws the player over and over and over and over like PoP2 does, it's just not worth it.
The only gamers who should even consider buying PoP2 are those who are (1) such die-hard fans of the series that playing the sequel is a necessity, or (2) possessed of rather low expectations and can get it really cheap. For my own part, I may yet come back to PoP2 and try to finish it someday. It's not that I'm masochistic, it's more that I have a hard time letting go of a game for which I paid good money (almost full price in this case).
I always feel cheated if I don't get my money's worth from a game, and for the moment that's where I'm at with PoP2. In my estimation, a gamer's money can be spent far better elsewhere. Consider yourselves warned, PoP fans!
05/11/2005