Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is without question one of the most influential platformers ever made. It's easy to trace its legacy during play. Moments where ledges fall away, revealing a specific path for the Prince to climb on, or removing pieces of scaffolding that the player balances on have been redone again and again and again. Uncharted, God of War, Tomb Raider, Jedi: Fallen Order, and many more all follow in the example that this game set, if in an extremely diluted way. So, does this original version stand up to the test of time? I would say it does fairly well.
What The Sands of Time has over most modern instances of this style is obscuration. While the Prince is much more agile than say, Nathan Drake, I think this aspect of the level design is much more active in creating engaging platforming. This is a puzzle platformer in a literal sense, where the button combinations and reaction times are pretty lenient, so the challenge is derived from pathfinding. The best parts of The Sands of Time are when it crafts a fully realized puzzle box of platforming. Spaces that are well realized enough to facilitate a sense of place, alongside engaging the player in solving the path forward. Ropes, columns, ledges, saws, beams, and more are dotted around rooms, and the player's job is to string these separate elements together into a traversable path. It helps, of course, that the contextual tools the player does have are satisfying to pull off.
As mentioned before, The Sands of Time is a pretty relaxed game in terms of the platforming. It could use some development, but it's a really good base to work off of, and if it was the only aspect of The Sands of Time I would probably be able to heartily recommend it. Luckily, the combat of this game is here to save the day! I get why it exists, this is a tale of swashbuckling adventure! White knuckle platforming, and acrobatic life or death combat! Unfortunately, the mechanics aren't up to snuff.
So, every once in a while, usually after an extended platforming section, the game will throw you into a combat arena. Usually, there are a few enemies idling, but stealth isn't an option. Unlike other games, you can't just defeat the enemies by dealing enough damage. You need to knock them down with standard attacks, before absorbing them into your knife, which is a prolonged animation. You have a button to attack, another to use the knife, the jump now vaults the Prince over an enemy or off a wall, and there are a few special techniques that take resources. It sounds good on paper, a simple combat system to act as a nice buffer between sections of the real meat of the game, but combat scenarios feel long, tedious, and unbalanced. The only impactful difference between enemies is that some punish the Prince for attempting to vault over them. Because the Prince selects which enemy to target on his own, I got game overs numerous times when he decided to absorb an enemy instead of freezing another. The time rewind mechanic has a strange restriction in combat, where defeating an enemy resets the clock. So if an enemy starts an attack while you are absorbing another, and you are able to finish, you take unavoidable damage from the Prince's lengthy recovery frames. Sometimes certain moves don't seem to work, your companion is actively unhelpful, and the camera feels the need to give the player as little helpful information as possible. All of this combines into one of the least enjoyable combat systems I have played in a long time.
I don't want to end this on a negative note. I really did enjoy my time overall with The Sands of Time. Yes, the combat is not good, and the story isn't anything worth talking about (The Prince is straight up misogynistic, the guy literally at one point says the female lead needs to learn her place and he needs to conquer her it's weird), but it does have a good base to work off of. I am excited to see where the series goes from here. Even if the sequel looks entirely unappealing.
What The Sands of Time has over most modern instances of this style is obscuration. While the Prince is much more agile than say, Nathan Drake, I think this aspect of the level design is much more active in creating engaging platforming. This is a puzzle platformer in a literal sense, where the button combinations and reaction times are pretty lenient, so the challenge is derived from pathfinding. The best parts of The Sands of Time are when it crafts a fully realized puzzle box of platforming. Spaces that are well realized enough to facilitate a sense of place, alongside engaging the player in solving the path forward. Ropes, columns, ledges, saws, beams, and more are dotted around rooms, and the player's job is to string these separate elements together into a traversable path. It helps, of course, that the contextual tools the player does have are satisfying to pull off.
As mentioned before, The Sands of Time is a pretty relaxed game in terms of the platforming. It could use some development, but it's a really good base to work off of, and if it was the only aspect of The Sands of Time I would probably be able to heartily recommend it. Luckily, the combat of this game is here to save the day! I get why it exists, this is a tale of swashbuckling adventure! White knuckle platforming, and acrobatic life or death combat! Unfortunately, the mechanics aren't up to snuff.
So, every once in a while, usually after an extended platforming section, the game will throw you into a combat arena. Usually, there are a few enemies idling, but stealth isn't an option. Unlike other games, you can't just defeat the enemies by dealing enough damage. You need to knock them down with standard attacks, before absorbing them into your knife, which is a prolonged animation. You have a button to attack, another to use the knife, the jump now vaults the Prince over an enemy or off a wall, and there are a few special techniques that take resources. It sounds good on paper, a simple combat system to act as a nice buffer between sections of the real meat of the game, but combat scenarios feel long, tedious, and unbalanced. The only impactful difference between enemies is that some punish the Prince for attempting to vault over them. Because the Prince selects which enemy to target on his own, I got game overs numerous times when he decided to absorb an enemy instead of freezing another. The time rewind mechanic has a strange restriction in combat, where defeating an enemy resets the clock. So if an enemy starts an attack while you are absorbing another, and you are able to finish, you take unavoidable damage from the Prince's lengthy recovery frames. Sometimes certain moves don't seem to work, your companion is actively unhelpful, and the camera feels the need to give the player as little helpful information as possible. All of this combines into one of the least enjoyable combat systems I have played in a long time.
I don't want to end this on a negative note. I really did enjoy my time overall with The Sands of Time. Yes, the combat is not good, and the story isn't anything worth talking about (The Prince is straight up misogynistic, the guy literally at one point says the female lead needs to learn her place and he needs to conquer her it's weird), but it does have a good base to work off of. I am excited to see where the series goes from here. Even if the sequel looks entirely unappealing.