I plowed through the game and it was rough. Prince of Persia is definitely not the greatest game I ever played and I don’t think it deserved all the praise it received. Regardless, I stuck with it and ultimately finished. I’m actually surprised that I didn’t abandon the game and start playing something else, like Brutal Legend which screamed at me to play ever since I realized how boring Prince of Persia was.
Maybe calling it boring is an overstatement, there were definitely some things about the game that were good, the story for instance. The Prince is walking through a sandstorm looking for his donkey Farah, when a princess, running from some guards runs into him. The princess, Elika urges the Prince not to follow. Not able to abandon a beautiful woman in distress, they make their way to the temple where Elika lives. The temple has been overtaken by a dark god Ahriman, and his minions have occupied four areas within the kingdom. It is up to the Prince and Elika to travel to each of the four areas and heal the five fertile grounds in order to bring back light to the world. It’s all rather standard video game fare, but there were a couple of mild surprises that kept the story interesting.
The Prince, played by my favorite video game voice actor, Nolan North (Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed and nearly every game ever made) is terrible. The voice acting is great and reminiscent of Nathan Drake in Uncharted, and that is exactly the problem, a Nathan Drake character doesn’t fit in the Prince of Persia world. The other Prince of Persia games had a more mysterious and even dark feel to them, and this Prince of Persia is a lighter reimagining of the series, but changing the Prince this drastically was, I think, a mistake. It’s unfortunate Ubisoft didn’t save the character for another game because he was funny, charming yet still a jerk. On the other hand, Elika fit in with the world very well, she dealt with the Prince and all his innuendo and immature qualities and yet still remained mysterious.
Then there was the game play. I droned on about this in my post, I’m a Casual Gamer… and I’m going to expound on it here. at he base of the map and where you started was the temple. The temple has four plates that require a certain number of Light Seeds in order to activate, each of these plates gives you a power that you would use to access the fertile grounds within each of the levels. This is where the problem arises, the Lights Seeds are available after you heal a fertile ground so you need to go back through many of the levels in order to gather enough Light Seeds in order to activate more plates. It can get time consuming traveling from one side of the kingdom to another to gather all these Light Seeds.
It’s an open world, so you could essentially travel throughout the kingdom at any time, but you will need the powers provided by the plates to reach the fertile grounds. An open world is both it’s strength and its weakness, because each of the area’s are very linear so you will be running along the same walls or jumping from the same columns over and over again, throughout the game. It’s tedious and after a few hours it becomes painful because you know how long it’s going to take you to get to your next destination. Heaven forbid you need to travel to the other side of the kingdom to gather more Light Seeds.
Battling the enemies is interesting and fun once you understand the mechanics of blocking and deflecting the attacks. Occasionally if you miss an attack it will prompt you to press a particular button in order to escape death. These QTE‘s (Quick Time Events) are the bane of my existence because I can never seem to hit the right button and Elika has to continually save me, it’s quite annoying. There are very few enemy encounters in that you are never faced with more than one enemy at a time. Sometimes you can bypass the battle completely by striking at an unformed enemy before it forms. All of the boss battles are easy and since Elika will save you before you die, there is almost no pressure. Though, every time Elika saves you health is restored to the enemy prolonging the agony.
I remember when I first saw the game before it was released I was disappointed the developers decided to use cel-shaded graphics. After playing the game, I think it was the right decision. It has been likened to playing in a watercolor painting, and I believe that’s an accurate description. There is great detail in the environments, the Prince and Elika look great and everything looks and feels consistent throughout the world. There is a snag. Since there are so few enemies in the game, it would have been nice to see some diversity in design. Midway through each area you come to what looks to be the same enemy every single time, another aspect of the game that already feels tedious.
So, how do I feel about the game overall? It’s alright. If you can get through the game collecting the majority of the Light Seeds along the way, you might have a better experience. I tried and fell short half the time, so I had to go through a lot of the levels again to grab the last 60 or so Light Seeds to progress. Thankfully, getting through the game takes less than 10 hours so even with all the backtracking it’s still a quick experience. The story is good and the ending is surprising, so it’s probably worth one play through; and for someone who doesn’t finish games often, I got through it.
