Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

We're in two minds about the latest Prince of Persia adventure.

From a primeval dawn, computer games emerged, and the world saw the first of the Prince of Persia, blinking confusedly in all his 8-bit glory. Time passed, sequels followed, and the Prince never truly went away. In 2003, Ubisoft resurrected him once again, in the Sands of Time. And Man saw the Sands of Time, and that it was very, very good. Last year things went awry however, in the shape Sands of Time’s sequel, the extraordinarily chaotic Warrior Within.

Two Thrones, the third and apparently final game in the series, is Ubisoft’s attempt to make amends for that, and radiates a feeling that, if the Dagger of Time was real and in Ubisoft’s possession, Warrior Within would exist only in its own closed, and very private time loop.

For the uninitiated, the story revolves around the Prince’s use of the Dagger to free the Sands of Time on the advice of an evil Vizier, causing death and destruction in the process, and his attempts to rewind time to before all this happened. Later the Prince travels to the Isle of Time to rid himself of the Dahaka, a demon whose purpose is to hunt down and dispose of those who meddle with the flow of time.

In Two Thrones the Prince returns to his home of Babylon to find (in a violation of the principle of causality large enough that great thinkers from Aristotle to Einstein would be spinning in their graves) that the once-dispatched Vizier is alive again and leading an invasion against the city. So the Prince sets off, via an endless progression of handily-placed walls, pillars and ledges, to find the Vizier, kill him and end the whole tortured mess once and for all. Again.

The challenge when developing a platform game is to make sure the player feels fully immersed in the world. This can either be accomplished by designing environments where the route through the game seems entirely natural, or by creating something so delightfully fantastic that the player doesn’t actually care. While Sands of Time was an undoubted success of the latter, Two Thrones falls sadly short. Graphics that were charming back in 2003 look rather dated now and the level design is such that it just doesn’t live as long in the memory - there is no Library, no Menagerie, no Bathhouse.

It’s as if the lack of coherence in the plot has spilled over into the world’s design, resulting in a continuum of samey corridors and rooftops. Worse, the platforming feels rather forced. The Prince has been blessed with some new moves, such as being able to stab his dagger into plates in the walls and hang from it, or make huge diagonal leaps from moving wall panels. But all these perfectly placed dagger plates and panels serve to remind you that this is just a game, a world engineered to be navigated by precisely this route.

Life is never simple for the Prince however. He has been infected by the Sands of Time, and can hear the voice of a bloodthirsty alter-ego talking to him in a decidedly schizophrenic manner. Worse, the Prince periodically undergoes transformations into a monstrous Sand creature. As this Dark Prince you have extra moves involving a chain embedded in his arm, allowing you to latch onto and swing certain objects, gaining access of otherwise unreachable locations.

While in Dark Prince form however your health is constantly dropping, and can only be restored by collecting Sand - usually from dead enemies. This makes these sections a desperate rush to the finish, serving to break up the otherwise slightly monotonous progression. Even so you can’t help noticing that they have been designed in a way that can only be completed as the Dark Prince, and so the forced feeling remains.

This feeling also permeates the narrative style of Two Thrones. In Sands of Time, the Prince’s voice telling the story naturally tied into the beginning and end cut-scenes, and created a playful atmosphere throughout. None of this is achieved in Two Thrones, and you can’t help suspecting that the voiceover is only present because it worked so well in the past.

One thing that has improved is the combat, which has always been Prince of Persia's weakness, from its general clunky nature in Sands to its overwhelming frequency in Warrior Within. Two Thrones provides some moderation, retaining Warrior’s combo-based free-form fighting while reducing the number of enemies encountered, and adding a stealth kill system, allowing you to sneak up behind your foes and dispatch them quickly and silently, by hitting the right button in response to a visual cue.

While useful, stealth kills can also be the most frustrating aspect of the entire game, as your cue (the Dagger turning a bright, shiny blue) can occasionally be obscured by the enemy’s body, or the game simply being too unforgiving with respect to human reaction times. That said, the game’s most amusing moments can often come as a result of throwing opponents from rooftops, beheading them with their own weapons, or just bitch-slapping them with your chain when in Dark Prince mode, not unlike that big German guy in Gladiator.

I feel I have probably come across as rather harsh on Two Thrones in this review as, aside from a few save-point spacing issues, it is more than enjoyable enough to recommend. The problem is one of context - while as a standalone this is the case, when compared to Sands of Time, Two Thrones just lacks that special spark.

Thus it is difficult to think about Two Thrones without feeling regret. Ubisoft has shown us exactly how good a game of this nature can be, but have fallen short of replicating the feat. It’s fun, but what it really makes me want to do is go back to 2003 to experience the wonder of Sands again for the first time.