In the pantheon of seminal masterpieces that shaped the industry which Weatherby completely slept on (I was too busy playing Sonic Heroes, probably) The Sands of Time has been among the most interesting to finally loop back to. Nowadays, it might be easy to take what it's doing for granted. Clambering up crumbling ruins, dashing across walls, and swinging along busted piping is pretty bog-standard movement tech, but Sands of Time established this type of traversal so well that in terms of responsiveness and feedback, it doesn't feel like the industry has come that far since 2003.

The Prince's movement feels precise and deliberate, and progression is dependent entirely on how you position him and the timing of your inputs. Really, there might be an argument here that games have moved backwards, as titles like Uncharted come with far fewer fail states, and parkour mechanics in games like Assassin's Creed feels more automated. However, those games have more going on, whereas Sands of Time firmly roots itself in exploration and movement, making it a far better translation of the "cinematic platformer" to a 3D space than games like Tomb Raider. Which are bad. Evil, some would say.

Unfortunately, combat is the polar opposite, being a grotesquely clumsy affair. Geometry frequently obstructs the camera, and the Prince will too often fixate on enemies and fight back against your inputs as you try to point him towards a more immediate threat, resulting in this feeling of whiplash as you no longer feel in control. Combat is rarely challenging outside of these annoyances and remains rudimentary throughout the entire adventure, and in addition to just being boring, the game also likes to dump an obscene amount of enemies on you during every encounter. You run into combat encounters more and more as you near the end of the game, and at a certain point they feel less like a pace breaker and more an outright impediment, keeping you from the parts of the game that are actually fun. I'd prefer a more complex system with a greater enemy variety, but in lieu of that, I'd rather nothing at all than what Sands of Time actually provides.

It's such a shame, because the rest of the game is pretty damn good and would otherwise be one of the easiest 4.5/5's I've logged on the site. An endearing masterpiece that has weathered the test of time. But ah, whoops, I gotta jump off this guy's head and slash him in the back- oh wait there's another guy- oh wait there's another guy- oh wait there's- oh wait...

If I keep harping on it, I might sound as bitchy and ill-mannered as the Prince himself, who spends most of the game being a misogynistic pissant. Look, he grows by the end, it's about the journey. Yeah ok sure he forcefully kissed a woman who (at that point in time) did not know him, then rewound time to undo it, but that's because he knew it was wrong! Uhh... I'm not gonna think too hard on that one. I'm not saying you can't have your protagonist be unlikable and learn nothing - hell, I love Popful Mail! - but I did find it a little funny how many times I leaned back and thought "wow he really said that." Dudes need to be in therapy, but they too busy playing with their daggers of time.

I could definitely see myself revisiting The Sands of Time in the future, even despite how much I think combat steps all over the experience. It feels as good to play today as any of its imitators and there's no denying its significance in gaming history.

It's not just my personal opinion, from a purely objective standpoint The Sands of Time is the undeniable peak of the franchise. What allows it to stand as the crown jewel of the Prince of Persia property, though? Sure, you could cite things such as its cultural impact or the lasting influence it's had on the gaming industry. For me however, it's the way it perfectly captures the feel of a Hollywood blockbuster classic. Something it manages to do even better than the likes of Uncharted, which was/is a series so clearly inspired by this it outright lifted over half of its gameplay mechanics from it! No wonder Disney tried to make this their next Pirates of the Caribbean.

This tale has it all: action, adventure, romance, and even a little bit of horror (those sand creatures really freaked me out as a kid). Yet it's the strong element of fantasy magic and the bond between its two leads that elevate it to something truly special. The interactions and budding relationship between the incredibly sweet Farah and the strangely lovable snot of a prince (that personality shift in WW feels less unnatural after replaying this) are the heart and soul of the adventure, even more so than the thrills and exciting set pieces. It's a dynamic that Ubisoft tried to recapture with the 2008 reboot, but couldn't quite manage the same charm. So sorry Mario and Peach, but another pairing has my vote for the best video game couple.

Making it all playable is the most iconic and phenomenal parkour platforming system in the entire medium that seemingly everyone, not just Naughty Dog, has borrowed from since its inception. Oh boy, and let me tell you not a single second of it is any less exhilarating today than when the game first released. The combat is really the only area outside of naturally the graphics and sound design (which are both still pretty dang good) that shows any age. Mostly due to the limited enemy variety and lack of any true combos. Luckily, the intensity of the majority of battles hasn't faded much. Enemies just keep coming like the zombies they technically are. Their numbers never reach the amount of, say, The Forgotten Sands onscreen at one time, but the relentless waves in which they come paired with the need to absorb them into your secondary dagger so they don't resurrect can lead to a decent challenge when the different types start mixing together at once. I love the animation that plays of the Prince sheathing his blades to let you know when the fighting is over.

Of course, no SoT review would be complete without at least some mention of its OTHER most defining aspect alongside the wall-running and jumping - the ability to control time. Being able to quickly reverse a deadly mistake if you have enough sand stored in your dagger? Legendary. No PoP installment can go without it since, and believe me they tried. Another quality that combined with everything else I've written about comes together to create an experience that's about as perfect as a game can be. If you've somehow never played this before, then you truly should because you've been missing out on nothing short of a significant piece of gaming history, a timeless classic, and an absolute masterpiece. Everybody else? Replay it again. This triumph and you both deserve it.

10/10

Remember when Ubisoft made games that were meant for entertainment instead of tricking people into "engaging" with their products? I do at least.

This is one of those rare games where everything just clicks into place, the platforming is great, the puzzles are good, the combat itself serves its purpose fine (and I remember it being way worse when I first played it around a decade ago). All of this is kept together by some really good pacing, the designers knew just when to ramp up the action and when to make things calmer, how many times in a row they should use a specific obstacle/mechanic before it got stale, you really can't ask much more out of the game.

What you could ask for though would be a little less waves of enemies at times, half of the encounters seem to go just a wave too long, it doesn't even serve much of a purpose since you can usually heal during the time it takes for the enemies to spawn again. A better camera would've been fine as well, a few times it can be difficult to figure out where your next jumping point is.

These issues though are greatly outweighed by the pros, plus a number of really good decisions on smaller things (the time rewind mechanic is basically iconic, the way the game presents itself is also really original to this day).

If you haven't played this game absolutely do so, it might seem very quaint at first since it introduces a lot of things that most action games made afterwards took, but you'll realize that very few if any of them execute these concepts with such efficiency.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time holds up astoundingly well. The platforming and accompanying level design is honestly still some of the best in the business, all these years later.

I was surprised how light the game is on storytelling; it's mostly just the beginning and end that double down on it. What's there is simple but really good - especially the ending.

Another thing I love is the music, which elevates an already enthralling atmosphere and makes even the most annoying fights feel epic.
Annoying is indeed sadly how I would describe the combat. There is some cool stuff you can do but the camera is an absolute pain to deal with and the game actually bombards you with enemies - who also delight in stun-locking you.
The camera issues extend to the platforming, though to a slightly lesser degree.

I won't lie, I got quite frustrated by these things but I could barely stop playing this game regardless. The vibe is immaculate, the platforming timeless (pun intended) and little things like drinking water from basins and streams to heal just cool.

Before playing this, I had very little exposure to Prince of Persia. I knew it was a series of action platformers. I knew there was a bad movie adaptation of it. I remember really wanting to play Warrior Within since the cover for the Gamecube version looked super cool and edgy, but my parents wouldn't let elementary school me buy it, so I ended up playing games like Chibi-Robo and Animal Crossing instead. I played maybe 20 minutes of the Wii version of Forgotten Sands a while back. That's about it. I only ended up playing this game now because I wanted to play at least one of the older Prince of Persia titles before diving into Lost Crown. Although I do think Sands of Time has some pretty big flaws, I do want to preface this by saying I had an absolutely great time playing it. This might be the recency bias talking, but this could easily be up there with something like the original Dragon's Dogma on my list of "best 7/10 games you'll ever play". A good two thirds of the game is made up of what would now be mockingly referred to as "uncharted climbing", there's a certain deliberateness to all of your actions that still makes it enjoyable. Most of the game's challenges boil down to having to figure out how to traverse a room or outdoor area, then actually timing things like pole swings and wall jumps to make it happen. Simply having to do things like press a button to raise yourself up or drop down a ledge, or not being able to stand up on a pole you can swing on and instead having to turn around, swing, then jump against the wall in order to get to a pole directly above you are satisfying enough to keep platforming interesting. Using the dagger to rewind time mostly seemed like a gimmick to me thanks to the fast load times and incredibly generous checkpointing of the PC release, but then I got to the point near the end of the game where you have to climb a large tower without it and I realized just how nice it was to be able to undo one bad jump or something without having to go through the whole sequence again.

The combat is rather simple, though not because of the Prince's moveset. You have a basic melee combo, a block and parry, several abilities tied to the Dagger of Time, and a few acrobatic moves such as a lunge that's performed by jumping against a wall or vaulting over an enemy to attack them from behind. I do quite like how most enemies don't actually die unless you stab them with the dagger while they're down ( a pretty clear inspiration for the systems used by games like Assasin's Creed or the Arkham series where you have to confirm takedowns) and the enemy variety is nice, but there are two things that hold the combat sections back. The first is that most enemies have one attack that's always the best way to deal with them. Use the lunge against the two-sided spearmen or the big guys with swords. Vault over the female enemies with two swords and the big hammer guys. You can vary this up, especially with the parry, but it always feels like you're just drawing out encounters in order to use cool moves that are weaker than the best option. The second issue is the encounter design itself. Fights are mostly limited to open spaces and enemies come at you in groups of three or four. Kill an enemy, and another one will spawn in to take its place. Repeat this 15 or 20 times. Now I get that that's probably due to hardware limitations, but it really makes fights feel like they're artificially dragged out when you just keep cutting down enemies and exact copies of them appear out of nowhere like there's a spectral clown car just driving around the arena. I also get that the development team didn't want the game to be like 90% platforming so they needed to put more combat encounters in the game, but doing something like putting some enemies in the mostly empty hallways of the palace, or even just putting some traps in the arenas and letting you use them on the enemies could have gone a long way.

As far as presentation goes, the game holds up pretty well. The art direction and the way that the Prince grows more disheveled as the game goes on really sell it, and Yuri Lowenthal's performance is easily a high point in his career. He manages to sell the Prince as both a cocky noble seeking glory and as someone who's in way over his head and who knows it. I particularly like the narration of the Prince retelling the story of the game to Farah and the parts where you fail and he goes "No no no, I jumped over the bridge" or things like that. The music was generally fine, but there were a few standout tracks. A lot of it is a kind of mix of metal music and stereotypically Arabian music. I really wish there were more tracks that leaned into using vocals like The Tower of Dawn or Discover the Royal Chambers, though. The story itself was decent enough, but I felt like Farah as a character was pretty bland and her romance with the Prince was forced to the point that I honestly couldn't tell if she was actually into him or just seduced him to steal the dagger near the end (it seems like she only did this because he hesitated the first time they got to the hourglass, but IDK). For like half of the game I couldn't even remember her name and just thought of her as the girl who pulled switches. I do like the overall story of the Prince letting his pride get the better of him and making a terrible mistake that he then has to try and fix, though. It's very much a tragic tale in the classical sense of the word.

The PC port was surprisingly stable considering this is just a game from 2003, but I did have two issues with it. First was that the fog effects are just fucked to the point of completely covering the screen in the stuff. Thankfully the fog can just be turned off, but I don't really know how much that impacts the atmosphere of the game since I played through the whole thing without any fog. Second was that a lot of the dialogue from Farah during gameplay was super quiet, almost to the point of being unintelligible. This seemed like some kind of positional audio thing, but I can't say for sure since there were times where I could barely hear even though she was like three feet away from the Prince. It was still pretty painless for an older title, though, since I didn't have to really mess with compatibility or fan patches or any of the other tinkering that you normally have to do to make a game like this run on modern hardware. Considering I mostly played this game on a whim and got it for like $2 in a Steam sale, I'm really glad I played it. I'm looking forward to playing the other PoP games in the future, particularly Warrior Within. I want to see if it's really as edgy as the box art suggests.

My first encounter with Sands of Time was at my grandparents house, just after they bought themselves a PS2, and this was one of the only games on it (yes, my grandparents are cool like that). It was a little too tricky for ~7-year-old me, so I never got past the first hour or so, but I nevertheless loved leaping and climbing with reckless abandon and would often replay that first hour whenever I visited their place, never tiring of it thanks to how satisfying the movement is.

Having finally seen the rest of it, I have to say that, as a true hallmark of action-adventure platforming, Sands of Time, for the most part, lives up to its sky-high praise with some of the finest wall-running, swinging, and shimmying that the genre has to offer. Some top-shelf level design mixed with a wonderful soundtrack and halfway-decent combat help cement this game as the classic that it is.

At least it would, if not for the unreliable camera and abysmal sound mixing. Thankfully, the camera at least provides an alternative view in the form of a fixed point, usually above the play area, looking down on you from above, but that's not always helpful during the game's numerous platforming segments. Granted, it's not unplayable, of course, but the camera gets in the way of the action much more than it should.

As for the mixing, no matter what tweaks I made to the volume sliders, the characters were always talking at a whisper volume, which, compounded with the lack of subtitles, caused some key lines to be almost indecipherable. While I could always get the gist of the conversation anyhow, the inconsistent volumes of the ambience, action, and dialogue would make Christopher Nolan jealous.

Still, there's certainly room for improvement in the sequel(s), and I have noticed that Warrior Within at least has an option for subtitles, so, thankfully, lessons were learned.

Overall, SoT is a great, well-directed, superbly designed, and scored adventure with tight pacing and fantastic platforming throughout. The story isn't great, and the Prince himself doesn't go through as much of an arc as I would have liked, but the frame narrative and ending scene are strong and lend a unique flavour to the game that sets it apart from its contemporaries.

Technical issues got in the way quite a bit, of course, but the gameplay foundation is immensely solid and satisfying to play from start to finish. For the impact Sands of Time would have on the industry, you can argue that there really is no better blueprint for action-adventure games than it.

8.5/10

The game that started it all, the reason I love linear action-adventure stories, and I am a gamer.

Storytelling time, I was little I wanted to play this game so bad I love the whole concept of time, but I didn't have a powerful PC but when I get the PC around 2005-6 and Played and finished, the whole POP sands trilogy, I fell in love with linear action-adventure games.

and after finishing my replay of SOT holy fucking shit what a phenomenal game this is, I am happy to say the younger me was a man of culture.
game aged gracefully, the story holds up, the whole journey of Prince and farah is peak fiction.

Gameplay is superb the platforming is amazing, the combat is basic but its strategic, e.g that each enemy has diff Immunities and weaknesses
Gray enemies are immune to wall attacks but can be 1 hit kill by jump attack and dagger absorb
Red enemies are immune to jump attacks and dagger absorb and wall attacks but can be killed by jump attacks
Blue enemies are weak to everything but 1 wall attacks can stun them.
like there is good amount of strategy in a basic combat system and there are blocks, parry and special time powers

I fucking love this trilogy back then and I fucking love it now.
10/10

I was a bit wary of the traversal mechanics being the prime gameplay feature; how are you supposed to vary the challenges enough when the individual traversal tools are so rigid? thankfully ubisoft montreal took cues from ico and instead tried to create intricate rooms where finding out that subtle path to get where you can not walk or jump on your own is its own reward. granted, sands of time is much less concerned with atmosphere and a sense of place than it is showing off how cool and versatile the prince is, but at the very least these sections feel good to pull off and are smartly laid out. at worst you'll have to contend with the occasionally-jumpy cinematic camera as well as the prince's fiddly slipups (it can be a chore to get him to wall-run horizontally when he would rather do it vertically), but overall for the time period they nailed the feeling of doing death-defying acrobatic feats without it getting stale by the end.

part of this is thanks to the sands of time itself, which serves as a glorified soft-reset. in practice: honestly totally necessary to paper over the game's clunkiness at points and make the overall experience seem more fun. given how often you'll likely miss a given jump either from misunderstanding the environment or screwing up the input, the reset makes things a lot more manageable. as the advertised mechanic of the game... philosophically I guess that sits poorly with me, but also whatever, I guess I just expected more use for the time gimmicks other than freezing enemies and rewinding time when you inevitably plunge to your death.

on its own merits it would be a pretty fun early aughts linear romp with constant setpieces and fun little puzzles, but they had to shoehorn combat in. an absolutely embarassing display on all accounts. did they somehow play ico and not play devil may cry at the same time? I don't need a full-on character action game, but at the very least some basics like "require different strategies for each enemy" and "make the soft lock-on subtle" and "don't map too many things to the same button" should have crossed the devs' minds. the fights are monotonous with enemies that blink into existence in waves in what feels like eons before each battle is finished, and occasionally they'll spawn in on top of you and really mess up your day. you're required to suck the sand out of each enemy as well, which is a rather long animation and will often get you hurt if an enemy decides to interrupt it, which happens an awful lot considering that enemies seem programmed specifically not to bother you while you're occupied. there's no hard lock-on and the soft lock-on seems to change targets literally randomly, occasionally making the prince roll completely away from where you intend to attack someone yards away from your original position. because of this issue, your sand-retrieval move will often be preempted by a freeze move on a different enemy given that the game does not take your left stick position into account at all when throwing out the moves, thus wasting your meter and resetting your sands timer down to zero. which by the way, if you retrieve sand from an enemy or freeze them or kill them in whatever way and then you yourself get killed, the whole sands of time reset gimmick isn't going to help you one bit. the list goes on and on with these weird little details about combat (why do they need to teleport? why does the camera seem to always want to get so close to the prince?), it's just absolutely atrocious in every conceivable way. the only thing good about it is that it affirmed that I do consider drakengard's combat mostly competent and that I don't feel bad giving it a good score when a game like this released to near-unanimous praise.

I think that overall critical reception relies a lot on the balance of the gameplay, and thankfully I'd say there's a good 60/40 ratio of traversal to combat here. the majority of what's here is fun, and even the combat can be mostly tuned out once you begin jumping over enemies' heads ad infinitum (this works flawlessly on both bosses as well). the game juices every possible thing it can from the movement and continues adding new wrinkles up until the late game. there's nothing here that makes it dynamic beyond some simple timers and cycle-based platforming, but when the room and scenario design is as rock-solid as it is here there's little to complain about. just make sure to put on a podcast whenever you get to the combat sections.

also I have not played the original version(s) of this but I found the ps3 hd remaster pretty poor all things considered. I'm trying to be nice and gloss over the many bizarre glitches I ran into (including the prince turning invisible and having his polygons stretch out into space whenever he appeared in a cutscene) assuming that they're results of a shitty port job. everything down to the sound mixing and the game select UI is shoddy to be completely honest. it doesn't help that the in-engine cutscenes are very unflattering and the in-game models look blocky and cheap compared to similar work from contemporaries.

The blueprint for what 3D platforming would eventually become, aka the ‘Uncharted’ action adventure game. Back in 2003 this was a really big deal, at least for those who played it and for the industry at large. It was a very different kind of 3D traversal. Unlike Mario 64 or Tomb Raider, the skillset of the Prince was a lot more contextual. This is demonstrated super early on with a huge set piece of the Prince infiltrating a palace under siege. We now know this as the boring bombastic intro before the real game starts, but again, at the time this was genuinely revolutionary. Bridges crumble under you at the most opportune time as you leap across to the other side, the camera switching to a dramatic dutch angle. Truly filmic, no but really, this was the most successful attempt at ‘playing a movie’ since Metal Gear Solid. If you tried that same leap without a gap to jump over the Prince would simply roll on the floor. As a 10 year old I was dumbstruck by this, but now I can understand this was a game about authoring moments, the hand of the developer was being felt outside of cutscenes for the first time. Obviously the DNA of this idea is deeply ingrained in so many games today. Every protruding ledge, marked wall, collapsing bridge that you find in every third person action game came from Sands of Time.

It’s common knowledge that despite great reviews it underperformed in sales (which resulted in the Warrior Within tonal 180), but developers definitely took notice and it wasn’t long before everyone copied it, for example the Tomb Raider Legend reboot from Crystal Dynamics was a straight rip. But really it was Uncharted (2) that truly popularised this style, evolving the traversal into being almost completely automated and entirely in service of the spectacle.

But that’s not to say that this is one of formative-but-unplayable kind of games. Despite some scripted aspects the platforming is a lot more skill-based and fun than anything in Uncharted. The developers had a big legacy to live up to after all, so you get a lot timed puzzles and deadly traps and the like. The storytelling is also extremely elegant with just two main characters, Prince and his love interest/companion Farah. This again is very Naughty Dog, with exposition and character moments being delivered organically during gameplay rather than constant cutscenes. The Prince also acts as a narrator too, telling his story from some point in the future. All of this made for a very dynamic, fresh and gripping experience. There’s a restraint and sophistication to everything. As a kid I was enthralled, as an adult it still holds up, both as a game and as an inspiring example of a team firing on all cylinders. The only real negative is the combat, which is too frequent and too repetitive. That said it’s worth persevering. A true classic in my opinion! ⭐️

God what a borderline perfect game. All the elements are in place for this to be THE game I'd recommend to everyone. Platforming and traversal are addicting, The Prince controls smooth as butter, camera is really cooperative, the time mechanics prevent frustration. Like they nailed everything on that end. I can see why this game became a parkour template for games in general, the amount of interesting locales and setpieces keep the act of holding the right trigger fun throughout.

Ooh and the dialogue? Wonderful. I love the characterization of The Prince and Farah, hearing how Farah slowly starts to get through The Prince's insecurities and find the thoughtful person he can be. I love the interactions between them!! it's so fucking good!!

But some rogue audio engineer delivered perhaps the worst audio mixing in the history of games. I played this on PC, PS3, Gamecube, and Xbox just to make sure I wasn't losing my mind, but I could not find a single version of this game where the audio wasn't mixed like total shit. The Prince and Farah's voices are deathly quiet, sword clanking is blowing your speaker out, the reverb is insanely high, and the dumbass Australian guard has the loudest voice in history, if an atomic bomb was going off outside your window during that puzzle you would not hear a thing.

For a game to have such amazing dialogue but drown it out under so much noise is one of the nastiest tricks the devil ever pulled. But the combat is the kiss of death on this game ever getting anything higher than a 3 1/2.

Combat is actually really functional for one-on-one duels, like, oh let's say for example, Prince of Persia 89. That's why, naturally, you fight hordes of enemies who swarm you in a way that doesn't work at all with the combat system. For how many options you get (block, parry, rolls, backflips, downstrikes, spins, wall-launches) you are only ever going to use the wall-launches or jumping off of enemies heads into downstrikes, because anything else is just not viable.

Enemies teleport to swarm you and the Prince lacks meaningful crowd control, so you jump off of someone's head, down a downstrike, suck them up into the dagger, and do this approximately 300 more times before a combat encounter is done. At least until a new enemy type is introduced who invalidates that strategy and requires wall-launching instead. Either way combat that starts off as novel and interesting becomes genuinely taxing and exhausting due to the brutal amount of it you are going to have to do.

Why would such a well-designed game have this? My guess is Ubisoft has a shittiness quota that has to be met. A game requires a specific amount of crap before Ubisoft will put their seal of approval on it. Rayman 2 accidentally shipped with only good bits and it was a huge embarrassment to the company.

Real answer though, probably worries about length. It's such needless padding and the game would be shorter without it, and I know back in 2003 reviewers were pedantic and annoying about how a 60 hour game would be considered too short, but I love how brisk Sands of Time is! It's a complete story with character arcs, it comes up with fun scenarios and leads to a thrilling climax. It's a swashbuckling adventure and is confident enough to not overstay its welcome, so fighting 20 of the same dickheads for hours is not worth the time and effort implementing it.

I can't overstate though, I do genuinely love this game. I would be losing my mind during one of the truly insipid combat encounters, thinking about just turning the game off and watching a playthrough online, but then it'd be done, and I'd get to hear Farah and The Prince chat, I'd get to do wall-running, jumping, climbing, and god it'd be like heaven. The good is so good in this game. It might not be enough to out-weight the phenomenally bad but that's what makes it such a compelling piece of art.

Veredito: quem dera toda franquia ressuscitasse assim.

Prince of Persia é um dos jogos mais influentes e que melhor envelheceram até hoje, e foi importante demais na minha infância. Após duas continuações e vários problemas, seu criador - que nunca foi gamedev de carreira - resolveu abandonar de vez os videogames... até uma equipe da Ubisoft Montreal decidir ressuscitar a franquia mais de 10 anos depois do original, e fazer questão de que ele participasse. O resultado é um jogo de ação-plataforma 3D incrível, que também envelheceu absurdamente bem.

Com diversas homenagens ao PoP original (inclusive quem platinar destrava um dos ports do jogo), um making of super completo, narrativa e ambientação caprichadíssimas e um arco de protagonista bastante acreditável... Não é nenhuma surpresa que Sands of Time tenha sido um dos meus jogos favoritos naquela geração.

que joguinho acima da media, tudo aqui funciona muito bem, desde a historia a gameplay, ainda que seja uma historia simples ela tem aquela pitadinha de romance para equilibra com a ação desenfreada dessa jogo
A gameplay é definitivamente oq mais marca aqui, sempre pensei que andar por paredes, roda em hastes de ferro, e se pendura em precipícios fosse ser algo chato em jogos, mas era por que eu ainda não tinha achado bons exemplos como esse, tudo aqui é tão fantástico e te da um sentimento tão bom e único.
O combate desse jogo tb é outro espetáculo a parte, nunca tinha visto algo tão maluco, ele é cadenciado como um bom Soulslike ao mesmo tempo que é rápido como um Hack n Slash, é algo extremamente único e divertido, sem contar o sistema divertido de volta no tempo etc
Tudo aqui foi mt satisfatório, ainda que esse jogo seja um poucooo maçante, e o boss final seja um peba, foi uma ótima experiência

You know? It had been a very long time since I last played this game so I’d kind of forgotten just how much I loved it. It absolutely still holds up for me as one of my favorite games. It so wonderfully thrives as a tautly paced, breathlessly fun, and downright swashbuckling action adventure experience. The game boasts butter smooth and engaging platforming gameplay that only becomes more complex and challenging as it goes on, level design that is well wrought despite being highly linear, mechanically simple but still immensely satisfying combat, as well as a very charming story with endearing and affably likable characters that you come to really root for and get behind by the end. The soundtrack and atmosphere are aces as well. Every ounce of passion that was poured into this game by the developers is more than evident throughout and it coalesces effortlessly into a remarkable final product that (no pun intended) has more than stood the test of time. Oh how I wish that ubisoft still made games that go this fucking hard.

Being a game released in 2003, I had a lot of fun working out the platforming puzzles without modern design that obviously highlights what and where you should climb. The hint system does enough to prod you in the right direction without the game outright holding your hand. The dagger of time alleviates some of the fatal mistakes by allowing you to rewind time and have another ago, assuming you have enough sand to do so.

However, the combat was the single biggest point of frustration for me. While the combat is serviceable when dealing with a handful of enemies, there are five or six instances where the game will force you into combat challenges where you need to deal with wave after wave of enemies. As these combat challenges usually happen in small rooms, the enemies will easily gang up on you, knock you down, letting the other enemies continuously deal damage, before you have the chance to get up and block/dodge their attacks.

It's because of these moments that I will never pick this game up ever again.

Where it Shines:
Music - 10/10
Story - 7/10
Parkour - 8/10

The Good:
This game has an amazing OST. It is a cinematic experience in it's own way too. The story, though simple, is well told. But where it really shines is in it's level design. The puzzles and platforming combined with the rewind mechanic were just a really cool innovation and spawned an entire genre of games like God of War.

The Bad:
The combat is...just bad. It's repetitive, obnoxious, and overstays it's welcome. More time needed to be spent on it.

Summary:
I have a fondness for this game, and really do hope a remake comes out like they promised. I can't say if it's aged well or not, but it still sits in my top games of all time, for now.

****note on my ratings:
half ⭐: hot trash garbage
⭐: below average, needs work
⭐⭐: average
⭐⭐⭐: pretty good
⭐⭐⭐⭐: excellent
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: all time favourite
half star ratings between those mean it's slightly better or worse than stated in this list.
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