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.
Remember when this series was a great puzzle-platformer, with occasional combat? Now it's God of War???
Spelling, grammar, punctuation? We need something that checks logic.
"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.
If I recall correctly, the original Prince of Persia looked quite smoothly animated and drawn.
Blar.
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 stopped playing the latest PoP's when I realized that I was killing the monsters using the same goddamn animation over and over and over again. And it's not like the game would send 2 or 3 identical beasties at you, you'd get TWENTY of 'em, and all would have to die using the "I'll jump over you and stab you at the exact same place". And I wouldn't do it 'cause it was the easiest way to kill'em, it would be the ONLY way to kill'em. Bad design, IMHO...
8 Pages of comics, up at:d ex.php
http://www.princeofpersiagame.com/us/community/in
Okay, seriously, +1 That's Nasty needs to be added to the moderator drop-down already.
Does anyone else think that Prince of Persia is just an update of Lode Runner?
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Having just spent the weekend before my finals on this game, my only issue with this review is that I think it gave it too low of a score. =) I went back and played Warrior Within to get back up to snuff, suffering through the overly looped music to do so, then dove into Two Thrones.
The good:
The music is back to the style of Sands of Time.
They brought back the Sands of Time voice actor.
Some additional platformer elements.
The dark prince is more enjoyable than the sand wraith was to play. The dark prince plays like a strange mixture of "Bionic Commando" and Kratos from God of War. Since picking up sand regenerates him to full, he gets to deal with swarms of enemies, and is fairly liberating to play.
The quick kill system helps remove a lot of the tedium of the encounters. Since you can avoid a lot of the "tons of enemies" fights by stealthily killing the guards before they can sound the alarm. I found myself trying to be sneaky, which was a novel experience for me in a PoP title.
I think they did a fairly good job of reconciling the two seemingly different characters of the prince from Sands of Time and the more callous, hardened version of him that came along later in Warrior Within.
The bad:
The last chariot race was annoying, well, until I went back to the part before hand and made sure to do it with extra sand.
It was too short. The one thing I did like about Warrior Within was that its environments were mostly bidirectional; you wound up going forward and back through the same general area in two different times. In Two Thrones they returned to the Sands of Time linear story line. I think they lost a bit of the free-form feeling that you had in Warrior Within.
There doesn't appear to be an alternate ending ala the last two titles.
Conclusion:
All in all I enjoyed the title. Now I need to go cram for finals.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Does it have Farah the hot girl from 'Sands of Time'?
when gamers would "stare" at her up close in her little skimpy red skirt and top for a prolonged period of time, her programming would take notice and she would spout out some witty remark, likely shocking lonely nerds into a defensive(alt+F4) reaction, thinking they were busted, painfully their zipper catches on.............
well you get the point.
Am no fek Buddhist, but this is enlightenment.
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.
WTF? Console games have had movable cameras since the days of the PSX. Limiting the camera angles is a design choice; the system's power has nothing to do with it.
Typically it's done because the programmers can't get a player-controlled camera working correctly and conveniently, or because allowing a wider range of viewing angles would require more artwork, or because they're going for a tightly controlled cinematic look.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.