Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time has finally arrived on Xbox and GameCube. The game was delayed on these formats in Europe due to a deal between Sony and Ubisoft. So has the wait been worth it for Xbox and Cube owners? Harry takes a look at one of the best games you will ever own...

So finally, the Prince arrives on the more powerful consoles. Why the delay? Well Sony had some deal with UbiSoft that kept folks in Europe from seeing it on other consoles. So Xbox and Cube owners had to wait. But hey ho, we're not at home to mister miserytrousers this morning so let's get on with the review, such as it is.



The titular prince is a flawed hero; avarice and pride have taken him with his father to India on a campaign of conquest. But pride leads to a fall, as the old cliché aptly has it. And everything goes pear shaped when the sands of time are released in the maharajah's palace. When these magical sands are released from the hourglass and the population of the palace are turned into zombies. Having wrought death and destruction the Prince must put matters right and he is not alone on this quest. The daughter of the Prince's vanquished enemy, Farrah, is also trapped in the palace and tags along for the adventure.

The interplay between the Prince and Farrah is touching and humorous. At first, they are enemies helping each other along due to shared interest in survival, but as time weaves its merry dance through the windows of their souls (yes folks it's metaphor hell here today) romance blossoms. It's something of a tradition, old charter or something, as author Robert Rankin might say, that two protagonists that begin a game, book, movie, medieval etching etc. hating each other's guts will most likely be shopping for cushions and discussing baby names by the end of the story. The voice acting is good and the script is funny without going overboard. As the game continues, one cannot help but like the Prince and Farrah.

The player is introduced to the Prince's various moves gradually throughout the game so there's no need to understand everything right away. The opening level introduces the simplest moves such as climbing, running along walls, jumping and hanging from ledges. As the game continues new moves such as swinging around poles, climbing and jumping from ropes, balancing on narrow beams etc. are revealed. The gradual introduction of each new skill means the player has a chance to become comfortable with each in turn and by the time sections of the game requires a quickfire succession of leaping, climbing, swinging and jumping I was amazed how much I could achieve with the joypad. There are moments that require a leap across a chasm, followed by running along collapsing platforms, followed by more jumping. The fluidity of the animation and the ease of the controls puts most games to shame and ensures that even these seemingly impossible combination of moves is attainable and will likely plaster a smile across the face of any gamer.

Some of the tasks required from the player are outrageous leaps of faith combined with quick thinking. With timed traps and collapsing platforms, there is always room for error. And that's where the Dagger of Time comes in. Not only is the dagger part of the plot, it's also one of the games greatest gameplay innovations. The Prince charges the dagger with time sand from clouds scattered around the levels and from fallen foes. It's then possible to use the dagger to travel back in time. In practice, this means that when the player misses a jump and the Prince is falling to his doom, holding the correct button rewinds time. It's a brilliant feature that means there's none of that save/load annoyance that so many games feature. The dagger also allows the designers to pack more outrageous obstacles one after another, as there is not as much of a penalty for making a mistake. Some of the levels would be appallingly harsh on the player without the rewind ability, but that safety net has allowed the level designers to run riot with tricky stunts and jumps.

Added to the dagger of time are save points littered throughout the level. Some games benefit from the option to save anywhere. But I think the save point system works very well in Prince of Persia and is reminiscent of the save system in the original, and best, Tomb Raider game. Often one can see the save point across the level and there's the urge to play until that point is reached. If the player does run out of sand and dies the Prince is not always returned to the save point, but to the beginning of the section he/she is playing. The game's designers clearly had the player's happiness in mind with these different systems; it's not a game where I ever felt I was fighting a losing battle against masochistic designers. When walking across narrow beams the Prince may lose his balance and fall. But there's no need to worry, he will grab the beam and hang from it without a button press. It's touches like this that allow the player to get on and enjoy the game and not worry too much about coming up against bad design.

For many gamers the combat sections of the game are something of a let down. While the animation here is just as superb as the rest of the game some fights really do seem to take too long. At one point in the game, I was fighting enemies next to a drawbridge and just couldn't seem to get past this battle. There were some enemies with pikes that stopped me leaping over them. And being crowded by foes, I found it impossible to recharge the health meter at the nearby fountain. Yet after a little thought I decided to use a few of the other moves I'd been introduced to earlier and the battle suddenly became easier. The moves are not there just for show, being able to run up a wall and flip over an enemy or launch oneself from the wall makes all the difference and mastering the moves makes combat a cinch. I would still argue that the battles are overlong and perhaps there to artificially lengthen the game. Perhaps the player should have been given an idea how many enemies have to be beaten in each section. But after mastering some of the more elaborate moves for combat this part of the game became as enjoyable as the acrobatic sections.

There's nothing particularly amazing about the sound effects, but everything seems to fit right. The music is rather good though. The soundtrack is a mixture of pop and eastern sounds, so we have Indian/Persian flavoured vocals meshing with drumbeats and pentatonic scales. It creates a lovely aural soundscape that complements the visual scenery rather well. Like the original Tomb Raider game, music is used sparingly and in the right places, to provide emotional resonance and convey the action – rather than just giving the sound hardware something to do while the GPU is busy. My favourite use of music is the lovely eastern flourish delivered whenever the Prince takes a drink of health reviving water.

Whichever of the two platforms the player chooses, he/she, will be in for a visual treat. There are few games that have blended design with functionality so well. While some games do a good job of designing levels from a gameplay standpoint they often miss the point of the locations being real enough to be usable – for example creating rooms that you can't imagine having any use other than as puzzles in a game. In Prince of Persia there always seems to be a sense that the locations were designed to be lived in and the puzzling nature of progression is down to the activation of the palace's defence mechanism rather than some masochistic architect messing with the minds of the inhabitants. Setting the whole game in one location could be problematic – yet the palace is large enough to accommodate very different sections. Locations such as the menagerie, the baths, the underground sewers (it's written in law that games have to have sewers) and the library offer a variety in styles that the player never feels confined by being in one palace for the whole game.