Slashdot Mirror
Review: Prince of Persia - The Two Thrones
- Title: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
- Developer/Publisher: Ubisoft
- System:Xbox (PC,PS2,GC)
- Score:7/10
Luckily, the Prince is a resourceful guy. As in previous titles, the focus of Two Thrones' gameplay is on maneuvering the Prince through what is effectively a three dimensional maze. Wall walking, ledge climbing, and impressive leaps all make a comeback from Sands of Time and Warrior Within. There are a few additional moves added into the mix to accommodate new story and combat elements. There is one new platforming element: Shutters. These spring-loaded boards are usually located on walls, and once you reach them by wall walking will rocket you across a room into an unsuspecting enemy. These shutters can often be used to start a Speedkill, the biggest change in the combat system from previous games. If you can approach or leap onto a baddie that is unaware of your presence, you slip into a slow-mo mode that requires you to hit the attack button at precise intervals. Doing so allows the Prince to brutally dispatch a foe with minimal effort and almost no sound. This added stealth element is a welcome change, allowing you the opportunity to quickly take out a room full of baddies and get back to the puzzle part of the game with minimal fuss. If you don't enjoy the normal combat, Speedkilling is the easiest way to get through the game without engaging in a lot of fisticuffs. Frustratingly, it's never entirely obvious when a baddie will notice you or not. If you remain hidden as you approach a baddie you are bathed in a golden glow, but even when approaching from behind it's possible for a guard to break your glow and drop you into normal combat mode.
Normal combat will be very familiar to players of Sands of Time or Warrior Within. The game still has one of the best multi-enemy juggling systems of any console title. It's effortlessly easy to flip and jump between multiple enemies, slicing and dicing until there's no one left alive. While you have your own blade, as in Warrior Within you can steal weapons from opponents both during and after combat. The capability to use multiple weapons ensures that besides the invigorating combat you'll have some options as far as the chopping goes. Combat as the Prince can sometimes be a white-knuckle affair, because for all his dexterity the Prince isn't a front line fighter. Luckily, or unluckily depending on how you look at it, the Prince has a darker half that excels at combat.
The Dark Prince is the result of the fusing of the Prince to the Sand Wraith, and if you thought the Prince had baditude problems in the second game ... you'd be right. But he's a jerk here too, as the Sand Wraith's dark energies force him to do terrible things. Dark Prince is a much more effective combatant, a length of chain (called the Daggertail) extending from his arm proving to be perfect for fending off large groups of foes. Gameplay as the Dark Prince is subtlety different. Every moment he's not in combat drains him of health, as the sands slowly kill his mortal frame. Puzzle completion, then, becomes a mad rush to reach the next fight sequence as almost every foe defeated refills the Dark Prince's health bar. There are a few different puzzle elements, too, as Bionic Commando-style the Dark Prince can swing over obstacles. This new split personality is intriguing both from a gameplay and storytelling standpoint, and re-interested me in the Prince as a character. The gritty Prince from the Warrior Within was such a tool that I found myself losing interest in what happened to him by the end of the game. Here, seeing the slightly edgier but mostly nice-guy Prince from Sands of Time battling it out in his head with the Sand Wraith, I could do nothing but empathize with him.
The game looks as good as ever, the soft visuals and sweeping architecture of the first two games returning with impressive results. Though by today's next-gen standards it may not be cutting edge, the care which the designers put into the look of the game made what power the game's engine does have come to life. Characters are well-textured, but the sometimes blocky animation has thrown me off since the first Prince title. From a sound perspective, I was much happier with Two Thrones than the previous game. Annoying rock music has given way to Mideastern-flavoured music, like that heard in Sands of Time. Voice acting was competently done, and I continued to enjoy the quiet asides the Prince has with himself as he travels through the game. The acting is probably at its best when the Light Prince and Dark Prince are arguing, resulting in a sometimes-hilarious schizoid diatribe.
I'll be upfront: I found the decisions made for Warrior Within to be almost Poochie-level bad. The 'gritty' Prince with the goatee and callous demeanor may have made him more hard-core, but totally turned me off to him as a character. One of the most satisfying aspects of Sands of Time was the way players could empathize with the regular old middle eastern ninja who had gotten himself stuck in a bad situation. The return of the Light Prince in Two Thrones was a happy decision, and the Sand Wraith's level of participation in the story was exactly what I was looking for. The wrestling with the self that the Prince goes through was an interesting story. Interesting enough, in fact, to push me through combat that I've been playing for almost two years now, and puzzle elements that I've long since become competent in. Two Thrones is a familiar game with some new paint, and in this case I'm okay with that. Fans of the series will be pleased with the way the story ends, and newcomers to the gameplay will find the puzzling and fighting just as enjoyable in this title as in previous iterations of the game. Prince of Persia: Two Thrones is a strong finish for an excellent series built on entertaining gameplay and powerful storytelling.
"Two years ago the pixelated graphics and long-ago memories of the Prince of Persia gave way to the slick and entertaining Sands of Time."
No, back in 1999 the pixelated graphics and long-ago memories of the Prince of Persia gave way to the absolutely dreadful Prince of Persia 3-D. A game so bad I wouldn't play Sands of Time until it was two old because I refused to believe that anything Prince of Persia related could be good after the 3D piece of crap that was Prince of Persia 3D.
I played "Sands of Time" and thoroughly enjoyed it. I've not bought nor played "Warrior Within". Since the reviewer didn't seem to like Warrior Within, should I even bother with it, or go straight to "The Two Thrones" ?
I might not have been able to finish the game in 50 minutes without saving..
But when our family's Mac II's screen died, i was able to boot it up, launch PoP by navigating the Finder using the keyboard, and beat the first level, just by listening to the sounds of the game.
I recently installed and started playing Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time. In the middle of playing, my CD-Drive suddenly started making STRANGE noises. Since that moment, my CD-Drive no longer works -- the actual hardware seems to somehow got damaged. This struck me as quite strange, because I was playing this on a laptop which was just 4 days old! I sent in the CD-Drive for replacement, when I happened to chance on a story at Digg about a copy protection method named "StarForce", which has the potential to damage CD-drives. I was reading the story when I did a search to see which games use StarForce: Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time was on the list! I was very annoyed to find that it was in fact Prince of Persia which caused my CD-Drive to fail, because of it's copy protection. This has completely put me off of buying any further software from Ubisoft.
We certainly played entirely different games.
No, you played the same games.. you just somehow responded to some other post than the OP.
The OP stated that the 'killing motions' were repetitive. Having played the first game in the series, I wholeheartedly agree. Yes, they're cool, but after the 500th time.. it's just not the same. And the slo-mo was so annoying to me. I just wanted to kill the fuckers and get back to the puzzles.
I played all 3 Ubisofts PoP games. To be quite frank I liked Warrior Within, it drastically changed the atmosphere and allowed you to perform better movements and pick up weapons on-the-fly, it gave you (and the game) an edge that you didn't have before.
:D. I liked using him more than the other one. The combination between dark and light prince gives you more variety when solving these puzzles, since now you can jumprope(whip) from one platform to the other.
I guess to start off with the first one, I found Sands of Time the coolest at the beginning, since you could actually fight other soldiers instead of transformed creatures. The puzzles were awesome and it really kept me going through the end, - that one almost-porn scene that was really.. really, out of the whole fucking touch.
As I stated previously, Warrior Within allowed you to perform more actions, thus solve puzzles of greater variety and let you pick up weapons that the enemy dropped. I found this very attractive (since, let's face it, who wants to use 1 weapon the whole game?) Some people were dissatisfied by the fact that instead of sand dunes and persian castles you got to go to an island and it made the whole game generic, but I have to say, I found the game really exhilirating; almost as if I was playing an upper-class version of Castlevania (With all the towers and all). However, I found the game too short. I turned into the "Sand Wraith" way too quickly.
Two Thrones which I finished a week ago rocked, but honestly, something was odd. For one, they drastically cutt down on the number of weapons you could pick up. In total I only saw 5-6 different weapons. The bosses were heavily unbalanced, since the last boss was.. for me anyway.. incredibly easy. The ending was kind of funky actually. As some other people here seem to agree, the Dark Prince does rule
It's really hard to judge a game like this because on one hand, the 3 of them are connected by a very heavy storyline which blows me away, but on the other, the transition between warrior within and two thrones got skewed, mainly because of the weapons.
Jordan Mechner who created PoP and Karateka was one of the first (if not the first) to use rotoscope tecniques for character animation.