Game Review - Prince of Persia : Ubisoft : PS3

The latest game I recently played (skipping a few others I have played and not had time to review) is Prince of Persia for the PS3 by Ubisoft. Now this game is an older title for this generation, circa 2008, however I believe that this game still holds up compared to its big brother Assassin's Creed II (is that the right term since its newer?).

Not surprisingly the main characters move very similarly and the games hold much in common for game play styles. Prince of Persia is very much a platformer in the sense that AC and ACII are. Most of the game revolves around climbing very complicated structures and obstacles to reach very high points in each level.

The Good:
Prince of Persia does platformers like they should be done. The obstacles are not complicated to figure out what you are suppose to do, however still provide a good challenge. The game has 4 types of special "plates" that are opened up only by collecting enough "light seeds" which are scattered around the environment. These are only available once you have healed the land in an area. The plates that are opened up provide access to additional areas to heal. The plates also require you to perform some kind of feat, such as the green plates allow you to run on walls, however the slightest bump and you will be sent back to the last successful platform you managed to land on. 

Story in the game was decent, it was driven mostly by very witty humor between the two main characters. This dialog was optional which is something I have not seen very often in games, it was controlled by pressing the L2 button on the controller and could be pressed as often as you liked. Certainly there were only so many worthwhile dialog sections, but the Prince was never short of cynical one-liners to say. I was surprised at how much of the games dialog was wrapped around the Prince trying to get in the Princesses knickers. I found this quite amusing, and her retorts were even more amusing, it created a chemistry that I have seen few games pull off. 

To top off these high points, I found it interesting Ubisoft's approach to deaths in the game. It becomes quickly apparent that you can not technically die in the game. Any time that the Prince would fall or would be killed by an enemy, your companion is there to save you. This is not overly cheap or simple in my opinion when it comes to the platforming, however I found it quite unrealistic in fighting the bosses in the game. Saving you does however give enemies a chance to heal so in that regard it wasn't completely unfair. 

The Bad: 
The ending, I won't spoil it for anyone who is going to play the game after reading this, but I will say that I just was not impressed. I felt that the end of the story was predicable (for me from the beginning) and was designed in such a way to simply anger you. I feel almost as if that is Ubisoft's motives in games is to make the players so angry at the ending of games that they must play the sequels to the titles just so that they can relieve some tension towards the franchise. I have felt the same emotion at the end of BOTH Assassin's Creed games. 

I am also not a fan of how they are selling the Epilogue to the game, a two hour "extra" level as DLC for 10 bucks... an Epilogue? DLC in my opinion should never have anything to do with main plot in a game. I think it should only include additional side quests and fun multiplayer content. I payed for the game, and I would pay for a sequel, but an extra 10 bucks just to see the end of the game, and not the crappy one that they gave me but a real freaking ending???!!! That's robbery in my opinion and I am not going to put out for that. Games like Elderscrolls Oblivion, or Fallout 3, or GTA, I can see having additional plot line as these titles are not strictly tied to their predecessors in the series. The stories stand alone on their own and presumably so will their iterations. Adding main story to these games expand their worth. Granted Ubisoft has not released another Prince of Persia in the story line, and from the looks of it, the next title in the series will not be continuing this plot line, so perhaps a DLC expansion isn't inexcusable, but a 10 dollar two hour one is.

Ah fighting... so important in many games, not Prince of Persia. Combat is sparse and only moderately exciting. The combo system is nice and the use of your partner's magical abilities to link longer combos together is somewhat innovative. Her use of magic does however remove the use of the triangle button for the Prince's abilities, so really more of a gimmick to seem innovative when they could have just given the magical powers to your character instead. Also, it seemed that as the enemies got tougher, gaining the ability to shapeshift which required you to perform only certain types of attacks, it seemed that even if you used that type of attack on them at times you still could not hit them. Their ability to block attacks is legendary, making for sometimes extremely long fights. 

Finally, I hate being analog screwed. If the reader is not familiar with this term, it is the act of trying to tell your character to do one thing but he/she/it does something else because of the slight variation in camera angle vs. analog stick angle. This game (and Assassin's Creed titles) are notoriously bad about this. There were many times that I expected the character to run straight up a wall, instead I got a wall run, only there would be no place to wall run to... frustrating.

Overall: 
Prince of Persia was a good game. I would give it an 8.5/10. Platforming is key in any good platformer and I think that Ubisoft is one of the best at what they do. I really commend the voice acting work that was done on this title and I would love to see more games take a similar approach. I still don't like the price of the DLC and I don't expect it to change, I guess I will just read a synopsis online... oh well.