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.
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.