Warrior Within was one of the first video games I experienced, and every time I tried the first game, I would get bored and start Warrior Within again and finish it. Sands Of Time took a back seat for me, as the combat system and atmosphere in the 2nd game appealed to me then and still does. At the age of 26, I finished this game and I realize how much I miss fairy tale stories and why this game is a pearl. Despite the rough edges like the sloppy PC port, the slightly unbalanced platforming elements, the same type of enemies, only one final boss, it is truly a legend. Kakolookiyam...


Warrior Within ilk deneyim ettiğim video oyunlarından biri ve ilk oyunu her denememde sıkılıp tekrar Warrior Within'e başlayıp onu bitirirdim. 2. oyundaki dövüş sistemi ve atmosfer o zaman ve hâlâ bana hitap ettiği için Sands Of Time arkada kaldı benim için. 26 yaşında bu oyunu bitirmiş bulunuyorum ve masalsı hikâyeleri ne kadar özlediğimi hatta bu oyunun neden bir inci tanesi olduğunu daha iyi anlıyorum. Özensiz PC portu, oyundaki ufak tefek dengesiz platform ögeleri, sürekli aynı tip düşman var olması, sadece son bir boss olması gibi pürüzlere rağmen gerçekten bir efsane. Kakolookiyam...

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.

I don’t think I have played a game that so perfectly fits the description of a troubled masterpiece better than Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The game has so many great features and gameplay mechanics that really elevate it to the top of the cinematic platformer genre that this series started. But for every great idea that presents itself, not too far around the corner is an equally worse one that just sours the rest of the experience. This game is coming off the back of Prince of Persia 3D, which is not really a game most like to remember when discussing this series. Where PoP 3D struggled with being derivative of the games the original duology inspired, such as Tomb Raider, and was plagued with a disastrous development; Sands of Time is much clearer in its design intentions, and instead of trying to catch up with the industry that had left it behind, Mechner and the team at Ubisoft carved out their own corner of the industry, which then would go on to have an arguably bigger impact of the industry at large than the original games. But, like I mentioned, this game has plenty of problems with it, which may be expected with a game that is truly the first of its kind, and it's these setbacks that prevent me from calling the game great, as much as I really want to. Don’t get me wrong, it is still enjoyable by all means, and maybe a more patient player can call it perfect, but for me, these flaws are too big to ignore.

Let's start with the good, because I think the gravity of the bad only makes sense in the context of the good. After the release of Prince of Persia 2 in 1993, the so-called cinematic platformer genre was continued, and then practically owned by Tomb Raider. The original PoP games were heavily precision based, having the player precisely time their jumps and actively think about spacing in everything that they did; Tomb Raider followed this up by taking those elements and putting them in a 3D space, and then using that 3D space to create gigantic and elaborate levels. But where I think Tomb Raider lost the plot a little bit was when it started focusing more on spectacle rather than skill; starting with the second game, Core Design began to shift their focus of design away from the skill based platforming that the first game heralded, towards using dramatic set pieces that lacked a lot of depth. Now, I believe that shift was mainly due to the yearly release contract that Core Design had with Eidos, so the more surface level, “cinematic” moments were an attempt to hold player intrigue without having to drastically change the core gameplay. But, nonetheless, by the end of the original series run, Tomb Raider kind of lost what made this genre special and unique, and it is here where Sands of Time steps in. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is still a very cinematic game mind you, the dramatic camera angles and more linear structure reflect that, but those elements supplement the very skillful and challenging platforming. The Prince has a rather simple set of moves: he can jump across ledges, run up and along walls, wall jump, shimmy along and climb up ledges, and spin into a jump from poles. All of these moves are simple to understand, but the game really challenges the application of these abilities. The pacing of each of the moves introduction is really well done and doesn’t overwhelm the player, this leads to a train of thought that builds upon itself with each new introduction, culminating in sections that have the player on their toes the entire time; the descent into and out of the prison, as well as the final climb up the tower were the pinnacle of this. Additionally, the reverse time mechanic really allows the player to try out different options and test new abilities whenever they might get stuck, it is the perfect crutch for new players. The animations also play a big part in this. Much like the original duology, The Prince moves in a very natural way, a way that is predictable, for the most part; this creates a great sense of flow and cohesion whenever the player is doing long platforming sections. But, as good as the platforming is, it is the combat that brings it all down.

Between each of the longer sections of wall running and jumping from ledge to ledge, there is a pretty sizable combat section, that almost entirely overshadow the platforming, and not for any good reason. At first, it looks like it functions very similarly to how combat worked in Prince of Persia 2, with The Prince being surrounded by a group of enemies that he must duel by attacking, dodging, and counter attacking; and it actually goes slightly deeper than this too, letting the player vault over enemies and hitting them from overhead, as well as using the walls to bounce off of and strike a diving blow. But, as soon as the higher tier guards are introduced, it all begins to fall apart. Up until this point, the vault and wall bounce had been the players go to for taking down enemies, but the royal guards upward, enemies are able to block even the strongest of attacks, and whenever a hit gets blocked, it stuns The Prince or knocks him down. Now, this wouldn’t be that bad if there were some invincibility frames on the getting up animation, but there are not, so what usually ends is that The Prince ends up getting damage locked whenever he gets knocked down because each enemy decides to attack one at a time at the precise moment the getting up animation begins. Add on top of this an absolutely awful camera that almost never cooperates, a control scheme that correlates with the camera position and not player position, and an auto targeting system that just doubles all of the aforementioned problems, and you have a combat system that actively screws over the player. And honestly, this is not even the worst part, really what kills any fun that could have been found with this system is just the sheer amount of enemies. There are too many enemies in every single encounter that doesn’t take place within the first hour; the player will constantly be hounded by every manner of high tier enemies, which just perpetuates all of the problems this system already had. Not to mention, The Prince's partner, Farha, isn’t invulnerable, meaning that there is a very high likelihood that an enemy will stray off from the pack and target her, effectively being a game over if this happens. This entire system is plagued with so many issues that it almost overshadows any good that the platforming had.

As per usual with these reviews, I do have a couple of notes that don’t exactly fit with the structure of the rest of the review. I really love all the small nods and references to the original duology, from the little cinematic that plays after a combat encounter is finished, to some of the minor 2D sections that are very reminiscent of its forebears, and just the fact that both of the original games are straight up unlockable as extras, being the only way to legally play these classic games in HD. Thank you Xbox backwards compatibility program. As well, while not explored to its fullest extent, the time reverse mechanic is a neat little feature that I think really sets It apart from; I wish it was explored more though, Tears of the Kingdom I think created a lot of fun puzzles and utility out this idea if you want an example. Also, it absolutely baffles me that they take away the entire mechanic for the last stretch of the game, like, the entire marketing factor of the game is just absent from what is supposed to be its climax. That is such a backwards way of designing a champion's road segment. That's about it I think, it's a game with a lot of good, but just struggles with some poor execution and one of its biggest aspects. So, while I don’t think it exactly stands the test of time, pun intended, it still is a classic and worth a playthrough.