Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Heal The Land & Save The Day
Prince of Persia returns with a new prince and epic story
+ Fun exploration elements
+ Easy Accessibility for all
+ Well Designed Story
- Not Very Challenging
- Frustrating Combat Moments
- Must take breaks from main objectives to collect objects in order to progress
Although this game is titled Prince of Persia, you are not playing as the original prince from sands of time. You play as a new prince, whose original goal in the beginning of the game is to find Farah, his donkey, not Farah from the other Prince game. That all changes when you bump into Elika. Without giving too much away, you must aid Elika in her quest to heal the land that has been corrupted.
Elika needs your help to defeat corruption and heal the land
The way you go about the game is a pretty straight-forward method. You reach an area with corruption, defeat the enemies, and eventually the boss in order to heal that particular area. Once that is done, you will need to go the next the next corrupted area. You are free to go in any order or land that you want, although a few will require a power up to access certain areas. These power ups each require a certain amount of light seeds, the games main item similar to orbs in Crackdown or Stars in Mario. These seeds, 1001 in total, appear after a land has been healed. Beware if you hate collecting things: you will need around 500 to complete the game so collect as many as you can before progressing to a new land.
The environment is fun to explore
The game is very user friendly so anyone should have no problem picking up and running around as the prince. The primary buttons have one function each, and the combat is very simplified as well. All the fights are one on one with Elika there to help you. You can never die and when failing a jump, Elika simply uses magic to reach you and you then retry the part again. This allows more time to play in my opinion, as you aren't dying due to cheap deaths or poor platforming elements. The game has virtually no loading sequences as well so you're more likely to play longer rather than failing on choke points found in other games. This may be a turn off for some as this makes the game a breeze in terms of difficulty to play, but I found it to be ok.
Defeat Corruption, Become a Hero!
The presentation of the game is very well done and is visually impressive as the game is very closely resembled to the concept art made for the game. This game is more like The Sands of time and is one that is worth picking up. Many stores have lowered the price on the game, so you may find it for a good price. Recommended play for Prince of Persia and Adventure fans alike. 4/5
