The Prince of Persia – Warrior Within review

According to my mini-research on the history of the Prince of Persia games, they can be traced back to the year 1989 where the first one was developed by Broderbund and apparently on the UNIX platform.

Since then he has gone through numerous platforms and with it quite a few developers. Today the Prince is back in the spotlight thanks to Ubisoft, which is responsible for last year’s excellent Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. This Christmas it brings you a darker, grittier version of the Prince; The Warrior Within.

Like sands through the hourglass...

The story continues from Sands of Time with the Prince still on the run from a mythical creature called the Dakaha which is a being indirectly spawned by the Prince himself because he avoided his prophesied fate of death.

This is the immortal incarnation of Fate. This creature is seemingly invincible and devours everything in its path similar to The Nothing in Fantasia from Neverending story (I’m sure some of you loved that analogy). This whole predicament is the result of the Prince releasing the mythical Sands of Time causing great destruction and the deaths of many, in fact the whole kingdom except for a handful of people protected by magic.

This largely explains the darker mood of Warrior Within because of our hero’s tragic past. At the start of Warrior Within, the Prince decides to make things right by travelling to the birthplace of the Sands of Time and prevent their creation. Thus begins our tale.

Acrobatics

There are a few interesting features, many of which have been in previous PoP games, that make this game enjoyable and set it apart from other action adventures/platform games. First a small introduction of the Prince; acrobatic doesn’t even begin to describe the things he pulls off.

He makes Jackie Chan look like Dr. Phil in comparison. You’ll be familiar with the standard jumping, grabbing onto this and that, swinging from ropes, climbing up pillars but he can also run along walls defying gravity for a few precious seconds, run up walls to grab onto a ledge. Somersault through the air to come up behind an enemy or use his sword to slide down a curtain pirate-style. Well, ok, maybe Jackie Chan has done most of these things but you get my point.

His agility also comes into play for combat situations just as the wall-running example I mentioned above. One of the criticisms for Sands of Time was the monotonous fighting but now there is a more robust combat system in place. You can either dual wield or not, which has an effect on how you fight. Dual wielding is achieved by picking up weapons from fallen foes and putting them in your left hand and it enables you to perform stronger attacks and combos but less acrobatics such as attacking from walls.

There are many combos to choose from and you will have to come up with some strategy as the enemies are not mere pushovers and often attack in groups. Alternatively you can sometimes run by enemies without fighting them or even slow down time to make things easier.

Which brings us to the game’s most interesting feature (again, featured in other PoP games) which is the ability to slow down or more importantly rewind time. Say you have been avoiding traps for the last fifteen minutes only to be skewered by the last one. Simply hold down a key to rewind time, you’ll see your last action rewinding to before you made that fatal leap.

Of course you can’t do this indefinitely; you have to collect sand (mystical sand of course!) from enemies or items, as a source for this powerful ability. In gameplay terms this alleviates a lot of the frustration that comes with mastering a platform game like this and in storytelling terms you are able to alter your fate, rewriting the story as you go along.

The Eye of the Storm

One of the things that can make or break a 3D platform game is the camera view and how accessible it is to the player. Warrior Within does admirably in that respect, it even raises the bar.

You have the standard cinematic-angle camera as a default, with the option of using right analog stick to move the camera in any direction from your current position. The game is designed well enough for this to be enough in almost any situation but you have the option of two other modes; First person view that is unobstructed by your character’s line of vision i.e. you can look in any direction, and also a landscape view which brings the camera up and shows you most of the scene.

The controls themselves are simple yet efficient. You use X for various tasks; jumping, grabbing onto a ledge or pulling yourself up or rolling on a flat surface. O for dropping down and you will also use R1 quite a bit for running up or along walls and L1 to slow down time or rewind time. All this, and other basics such as the camera view, are covered in a tutorial stage which is also a part of the game itself.

The times they are a changing

While Sands of Time was faithful to the original look and feel of the Prince of Persia games, namely the storybook 1001 Arabian Nights style of adventure, Warrior Within approaches things differently most noticeably in terms of music.

Bands such as Godsmack (one of the trailers features their I stand alone track) provide the soundtrack and the in-game music is heavy rock which creates some clash of styles; there are no electric guitars in the Prince’s world.

Our hero is also more intense and brooding, reminiscent of someone like Snipes as Blade, someone with a superhuman quality but a troubled past, and in that way the music fits his state. In tune with this, the game is more violent than earlier ones, featuring beheadings, bodies split in half and various dismemberment of enemies but hey, they’re mostly mindless undead anyway. You’ll soon get used to this new approach but initially it might put some Prince of Persia purists off.

For someone who has not played recent PoP games this game has a somewhat steep learning curve but once you learn how things work and develop a fighting style, your progression will be much smoother.

The game also tackles one of the criticism for Sands of Time, namely that is takes longer to complete (I’d estimate 10-15 hours this time around depending on how much time you spend on extra features). This is partially due to the reuse of areas because sometimes when you travel back in time, you get to experience the same area you just covered, but in a different time zones.

This makes for some nice. A wall that has crumbled in the present is still there in the past enabling you to access a new area or that traps and levers that were functional in the past are not active in the present and so on).

And everyone lived happily ever after

The attention to detail is good throughout the game, both in terms of graphics and level design. Apart from the environment changing when you travel in time, there are details such as dust blowing up when you slide along a ledge or you having a harder time jumping when standing in water.

Another nice touch is that sometimes when you execute a nice-looking move in a combat, time slows down Matrix-style. The motion capture is excellent; every move by the Prince is poetry in motion.

While last year’s Sands of Time is considered more appealing in terms of style and difficulty, Warrior Within is an excellent sequel in its own right. The downsides of the predecessor have been addressed in the better combat and lengthier adventure.

For an action adventure it’s the almost the complete package; great graphic design, attention to detail, excellent controls and camera and well thought out levels and encounters.