First impression:  Interesting.

Second, and third, impression: Fun in pieces.

Prince of Persia is one part fighting, two parts talking, and three parts running and jumping.  After a while, with monotonous swordplay and a flat story line, the game becomes quite boring. The story isn’t too interesting (plus I’m someone who doesn’t usually enjoy video game stories; but this one is particularly dull).  In short your “counterpart” Elika’s father releases an Evil God, Ahriman, who plagues the Persian landscape with Corruption.  Your task, with help from Elika’s knowledge and magic, is to heal the Corruption and trap Ahriman once again.  Elika’s magic is derived from the God Ormazd, and it is Elika who actually heals the fertile grounds after you defeat the guards of the Corruption in a one on one (or two since you have Elika) fight sequence.  The story is told through conversations with Elika, which take a lot of time to actually complete in order to learn, which is annoying.  The overall story seems lazy although beautiful.  It’s a fairly easy game, where the majority of the game involves running, jumping, climbing, and sometimes flying.

The acrobatics in Prince of Persia are interesting.  It’s always fun when a video game defies the law of gravity, and this game does it time and time again.  You can run along walls as well as run upside down.  The swordplay and fight scenes are very majestic, but the actually fighting is boring and monotonous.  The different combat options are a sword attack; a gauntlet attack where you throw your opponent in the air;
an acrobatic attack where you move quickly away; and you can also use Elika’s magic to help you while fighting.  You can also block any attack and not take damage.  However, the one on one fighting is where the game breaks down.  The fight scenes become a boring button-mash after a while in order to defeat your opponent.  The biggest problem, and it’s an interesting one, is that you can’t die.  Even when fighting opponents, if you are about to be killed Elika steps in, uses her magic, and saves you.  The only down side to being saved is that your opponent regains health, making it more difficult to defeat.  However, it doesn’t make your opponent that much more difficult to defeat, it just makes the fight scene take a little while longer.  If you spend a long enough time button-mashing, and blocking and waiting for your opponent to attack either 4 or 5 times before they pause and then attack, you will win eventually.  If you don’t want to use any skill to win, then you don’t need to, and if you do use skill and lots of combos, you will walk through the game.

After you heal each fertile ground light orbs appear and you are able to run and climb about to get them.  These light orbs give Elika more power and can unlock special magic powers, like transporting and flying, to get to different fertile grounds. This part, to me, is very boring, although it is difficult at times figuring out how to get to some of the orbs.  The dumb thing, though, comes back to the fact that you can’t die which makes some of these difficult light orbs not so difficult.  Sometimes there are light orbs just out of reach, and rather than figure out how to get it and return to safety, you can jump off the ledge, grab it, and then get saved by Elika.  I think there needed to be some sort of penalty for being saved by Elika because I fell into a trance of continually running around rather than taking my time figuring out the best way to the next fertile ground.

Where the game really makes a mark, however, is in the graphics.  As you run from fertile ground to fertile ground, in the background are some magnificent sights.  The graphics team at Ubisoft truly went above and beyond when it comes to the background graphics.  Although the swordplay is boring, the visuals and graphics are stunning.  The surround sound and beautiful sparks and distant landscapes made me want to continue the game.  This doesn’t mean the game is good, but it does mean the game had a chance to be a great game.  Now, when you fall off a cliff Elika will jump down and grab your arm.  This is where I think the graphics team dropped the ball a bit.  I understand they probably put countless hours in with the landscapes, but, regardless of where you fall it’s always the same shot of Elika’s arm reaching down grabbing the Prince’s arm.  I wish here they made an effort to show the beautiful landscape they worked so hard to create in many of the other scenes.  Every time I fell I wanted to see different shots of the Prince and Elika jumping down to the rescue; but nothing of the sort happened.

In truth, Prince of Persia is nothing too special.  I would say the game has already been forgotten by those who own it, and also by those looking for new games to buy.  The game doesn’t offer any multiplayer, either co-op or online, and in today’s age, exclusively single player games fly out the window awfully quickly if there is nothing spectacular to draw you in.

Overall: 7 out of 10

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