Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was easily one of the best games of the current generation, featuring gorgeous graphics, great music, and some of the best platforming gameplay to grace 3D gaming. Granted the combat was somewhat lacking, and the game only took a day for most experienced gamers to the complete, but those flaws were easy to overlook given the extraordinary amount of fun it was to simply maneuver around the grandiose environments. Regardless of their relative insignificance to the overall quality of the fantastic experience, these faults became the focal point around which the eagerly anticipated sequel, appropriately dubbed Warrior Within, has been designed- the results of which bear mixed levels of success. While the individual imperfections from the first title have all been dramatically improved upon in of themselves, changes have been made regarding the fundamental nature of the game; combat has overtaken platforming as the central gameplay component in the Prince’s latest adventure resulting in a game that feels dramatically different and distinctly inferior its predecessor. Make no mistake, Warrior Within is nothing less than a great game, but in comparison to the genre-defining near-perfection of The Sands of Time, it can hardly be considered anything if not a disappointment.

Story

The plot of Warrior Within has the player catch up with the Prince shortly after the conclusion of the Sands of Time, in which the Prince utilized the sands to rewind time and prevent them from being unleashed in the first place. It soon becomes quite clear to the Prince that his hell is only just beginning, as upon returning home to Babylon he finds himself being stalked by an unwavering, unstoppable beast. After years of running and fighting, with little sleep and never feeling truly safe, the Prince has managed to collect bits and pieces of information pertaining to his situation and the entity hell bent on ending his heart beat. As the man who released the sands of time, the Prince sealed his fate and condemned himself to death. Before he would meet that death however, he used the Sands to rewind time - essentially creating a loophole in this cosmic contract and becoming a time anomaly. As a result of this unforeseen circumstance, Fate has manifested an unstoppable beast called the Dahaka to track down and kill the Prince. Out of options and running out of time, the Prince decides that his only chance at survival is to prevent the entire sequence of events from happening in the first place. To accomplish this revision of history, the Prince heads for the Island of Time, the place where the sands where originally created.

The premise behind the story is solid, as the narrative holds quite a bit more complexity than what was found in the straightforward tale of personal redemption found in The Sands of Time. The only real downside to the storyline is a fairly weak cast of supporting characters. Make no mistake there are some cool characters – the Dahaka, the SandWraith, and Shadee are all look great and give off a persona of menace, but none are particularly developed and it is unlikely anyone will care one way or another about defeating them, other than the standard satisfaction that comes with defeating a challenge. Speaking of new characters, the Prince of Persia himself could essentially be considered a new character considering just how much he‘s changed since the last time we saw him. Having gone through hell the past few years, the rude yet undoubtedly charismatic young Prince we once knew has been replaced by a no-nonsense nomadic warrior, transfixed on the simple goal of surviving from one day to the next. While a character developing as a result of circumstance is hardly a bad thing, in this case it has had the unfortunate effect of removing much of the character’s appeal. Where there was once wit and charm, and where there should now be a sympathetic sense of desperation, there is merely a sense of aggression combined with general stoicism. Furthermore, the Prince is now a static entity, with nary a smidgen of character development taking place over the entirety of his adventure. The Prince is quite the brooding badass, which will no doubt make him immediately appealing to a large audience (myself included), but whereas the Prince from the original game grew on the player as time wore on, the appeal of the new Prince quickly fades due to a lack of depth.


Say hello to the Dahaka. No run the **** away!

Gameplay

Exploration

Warrior Within is built around the same fundamental gameplay paradigm as its predecessor and though some key alterations have been made to the overall structure of the game, the majority of the gameplay mechanics have remained essentially unchanged. First and foremost, the linearity of the Prince’s last adventure stands in stark contrast to the layout of his latest journey, as the Prince is now able to complete his primary objectives – the activation of two towers on opposing sides of the Empress’s palace – in any order the player sees fit, in addition to being able to wander about at his own discretion in search of various extras, unlockables, and hidden trap-laden hallways leading to health-boost stations. The upside of this setup is the obvious freedom it affords the player, the downside being that like many other adventure games featuring open environments Warrior Within has a fair degree of backtracking. The problem is exacerbated by arguably the least useful ingame map in recent memory, an illustrated top-down view of the castle from the outside that does little other than give the player the vaguest of indications where they are, and where they should be going. As such, players are likely to find themselves backtracking after establishing that yes, they shouldn’t have taken that left two rooms back.

The annoyance is slightly reduced by the fact that in many cases of backtracking, the area will be slightly different the second way through. UbiSoft Montreal has taken a page from Crystal Dynamics’ Soul Reaver franchise in constructing two parallel worlds for the player to travel between in order to solve puzzles and make their way through the Palace of Time; the present day, in which the Palace of time is a dilapidated shell of its former grandeur and some instance in the past, a time in which the Palace was in pristine condition. Traveling centuries through time requires more sand than the Prince can hold at any given time, so doing so must be done through special pre-made portals littered throughout the Palace of Time. Different areas are opened up in each time zone as a result of the devastation that Palace has endured over its history; for example, rubble blocking an entrance doesn’t exist in the past, while fortified walls from the past are deteriorated to an extent that they are passable in the present. While this somewhat diminishes the sense of deja vu one feels passing through the same rooms and encountering the same enemies, it still feels a somewhat artificial way of increasing the game time from eight hours to between twelve and fifteen, as players will spend at least a quarter of that time renegotiating time consuming platforming sections, and simply making their way through several large portions of the castle over and over. Finally, there is the addition of actual boss encounters throughout the game, all of which are tougher than the last boss of The Sands of Time; the final battle in particular is a rather satisfying affair, but a few of the smaller ones along the way become tedious because your opponents are rather similar, and the best tactics rely on not using the advantages afforded by the new combat system (grappling and extensive combos).