Another year, another Prince of Persia game. If the series keeps going then I’d expect them to put the year following the main title instead of a subtitle EA-style, but apparently this is the last in a pre-planned trilogy apparently. Without wanting to start the review in such a negative way, I’m rather glad it's the last one; the formula is tired now, Ubisoft haven’t fixed what was broken in Sands of Time, and Warrior Within, and there’s a certain two other titles in the same genre that came out in 2005 that surpassed the PoP games in every way.
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (PoP:TTT) is now set back in the beautiful Persian city of Babylon where the original game was set, so there are no evil pirate ships to annoy gamers who didn’t appreciate the rather dark appearance and setting of last year’s game, Warrior Within. However Babylon isn’t the peaceful city that our favourite prince remembers; war has broken out there and many people have been killed, buildings have been destroyed and it’s basically a huge mess that someone needs to sort out. After killing Dahaka and rescuing Empress Kileena in Warrior Within, the Prince has actually caused more problems for himself – See, Doc Brown in Back to the Future was right about not messing around with Time Travel, it just causes more problems!
So it’s business as usual, you must jump, wall run and swing your way around the cleverly designed levels. The prince now has some new moves to pull off too; he can use his dagger to stick into specific grates in walls and either jump or wall run from them, there are now shutters that spring the prince off at 45 degrees when he runs over them and he can now slide down and shuffle up walls which are and arm’s width apart. All his previous moves are there too, and the levels are of course designed to string lots of moves together to make the prince sail through sections like it was all scripted, and it looks great and is definitely the most enjoyable part of the game.
The Prince now has a dark side too, and anyone that played to the end of Warrior Within will have seen him like it before. He gets cursed by the Dagger of Time, and on occasion he turns into the Dark Prince. His moves and abilities are greatly increased here, and you have a cool weapon which is a huge chain whip that takes out any enemies near by and kills them very quickly. You can also use the chain whip to swing over ledges, and grab blocks and drag them towards you, often resulting in doors opening or platforms appearing. Whilst playing as the Dark Prince (which is decided by the game, you can’t switch to him just any time you wish) your health is constantly draining, and you must kill enemies or smash objects and get sand from them to fill your health bar up – a feature that would be welcome when playing as the normal prince too. As you’re always losing health, there is no time to hang around, you have to run through sections and learn how to get from A to B very quickly before you drop dead on the floor.
The combat in the game has always divided fans, with some gamers loving it, and some gamers wishing it would go away and let them get on with the game’s best feature - platforming and puzzle solving - in peace. I fall into the latter category, so seeing guards appear out of thin air in the very first section of the game didn’t exactly please me. It’s not that I don’t want any fighting in the game – I love combat games, and I adored Devil May Cry 3 and more recently God of War. The difference with those two games and the Prince of Persia games is that it works better. For starters the combat here is far too hard; the very first guard you come across takes a huge chunk of energy from you with just one hit – the first guard in the whole game! If they knock you to the ground you struggle to get up as they continue to hit you constantly, and they have amazing attacks that can break through your guard, and in return they can block forever. Another problem is that it’s not fluid enough, and feels glitchy. Both DMC3 and GoW run at 60 frames per second, and it makes a huge difference in the animations and combat. In both of those games it is smooth enough to allow parrying, animation breaking, and counter attacking – you are unable to do anything like that consistently in PoP. You do not feel in full control of the Prince during combat; he never fully does what you expected he would do, attack animations often continue long after you want to change direction, and you inevitably end up paying the price for it.
A new move called “Speed Kill” has been introduced into the series to apparently help reduce the combat in the game. In theory this sounds great as you have to stealthly kill enemies so they are unable to raise the alarm to other guards/sand creatures, making your path less fraught with enemies and life and death combat. If you’re hanging above them, or just standing behind them the screen will pulsate with a blur effect – at this point you press ‘Y’ and you enter the Speed Kill mode. The prince will perform a move, and the screen will go sepia for a short time, the dagger glows blue and during this moment you must press ‘X’ to attack the enemy. Often you have do one or two moves in succession to perform the kill, later you will have perform 4 or 5 perfectly-timed attacks on one guard to kill him. Very early in the game this move works really well. You have about a second to perform the attack, and you very often succeed with it. Great! You think, no more numerous enemy attacks. However after about an hour of play the difficulty suddenly ramps up, and you have less then half a second to perform the attack. This is obviously incredibly difficult to perform, especially 4 or 5 times in a row, and oh my do you pay the price for your mistake. What seems like every enemy in the city comes and attacks you, and it’s suddenly Sands of Time and Warrior Within all over again. Too. Much. Combat. And why oh why did Ubisoft make it so hard to perform this move? It’s utterly pointless having it in the game because 99.9% of the time you fail to do it correctly. This isn’t challenging or fun - it’s frustrating and annoying, and completely unfair to expect a player to be able to react that quickly to an onscreen action, and worse of all the timing actually seems to be messed up, as you seem to actually need to anticipate the timing, rather than react to the on-screen cues as the game suggests.
The problems sadly don’t here either, as when you die you are sent back far too far to the last checkpoint, and often have to work your way through a complex level of performing moves etc and getting past guards to get back to the part you just died on. And if you manage to get past that really hard bit, you’ll just as easily die in the next room and have to do it all again. And again. Checkpoints are too far away, water fountains (where you get health and save) are far too far apart, and the game constantly seems to make you replay sections that you’ve already completed flawlessly. Why do Ubisoft make this attractive game so painfully difficult for players? If they have done a certain set section perfectly why force them to do it again? It’s unreasonable asking that much of gamers, they’ll simply give up and not play it again.
It’s really sad that a game with such fantastic level design, with superbly laid out playgrounds which work perfectly with the prince’s moves and abilities are included with such an average combat system and unnecessarily hard difficulty level. If you want to make your game tough then fine, but at least include a setting for normal gamers who have average (non-saintly) levels of tolerance and patience and access to more than one game.
The bosses in the game now are much better than Warrior Within, and often you must use the Speed Kill move to perform attacks on them. Strangely here you get more time to perform than you do against a normal guard, and these bosses demonstrate how good the Speed Kill system is when it works properly. Also included in the game are chariot races, where you must get on a chariot and race through the city streets escaping from the enemies and attacking them when they come close. These are terribly simplistic as you charge headlong simply steering left or right at the correct moment, beating off the occasional hitchhiker. There are only a couple of them in the game, and they only last a few minutes each. Thankfully.
Graphically PoP:TTT is a pretty game, with a great artistic style for the city and characters. Draw distance is impressive, allowing you to view the entire city at times, and the camera works well always allowing you to see exactly where you need to go during platforming sections. In places you’ll be able to get an aerial view too, giving you a better idea of where to go next. The Prince still has quite dark look about him, and he now has many battle scars across his body and face and his clothes are all ripped – he’s a toughy to look at, that's for sure, despite his posh transatlantic accent and reluctant, sulky attitude. Voice acting is generally good enough, although the game is now narrated by The Empress of Time which is quite odd. The prince can carry out full on conversations with her whilst running and jumping, which is rather a poor idea, and sometimes this narration continues through cut scenes, which is just plain sloppy.
Whether you’ll enjoy this game depends entirely on how much you want to see the ending to find out what happens. I honestly can’t see many people seeing the end credits simply because it’s too darned frustrating to play, and you often feel cheated that you constantly have to redo sections that you have already completed perfectly. Many developers have learnt from others and included fair checkpoint and health systems, and have also looked at other games in the same genre to see how other developers do certain things. From playing the third Prince of Persia game I can see that Ubisoft are clearly not interested in changing the formula to make a better game, which is a great shame. Hopefully this really is the last one in the series, and the developer will return to the drawing board again and start from scratch. Seven out of Ten. Just.
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