Prince of Persia, aka Collect a bunch of orbs with no risk of dying

I never got around to playing any of the Prince of Persia games from the last console generation, and so when I was at Best Buy and saw the new, re-launched Prince of Persia, which introduces a new main character and is independent of the previous series, I decided to pick it up. It seemed more interesting than most anything else on the shelf, and it had gotten a fair amount of acclaim. Suffice to say, I found the game incredibly disappointing. The game is nothing short of gorgeous to look at, and its clear that a lot of effort was put into its production, but its not enough in my mind to make up for the fact that the actual core gameplay just isn't really all that fun.

The premise of the game is this: you're a lone miscreant who's out in the desert looking for your donkey when you run into Elika, a mysterious woman who worships the God Ormazd, from whom she is granted magical powers. She enlists your help in restoring the ancient city which she was once the princess of, which is now deserted of people and has been covered in black goo that vaguely resembles the stuff the Venom suit was made out of in Spiderman by the evil God Ahriman. It's a pretty simple, by-the-numbers video game plot. In an attempt to make the characters more endearing, your character and Elika have a bunch of back-and-forth banter throughout the game, which I think is supposed to be witty, but is moreso just annoying, not to meniton that some of the stuff they say seems completely anacronistic to ancient Persia. At any point when you're standing still outside of combat, you can hit L2 to talk to Elika to get more of her backstory. The game pushes this constantly, and actually awards you trophies for your Playstation account if you talk to her often enough. For me though, the prospect of an intangible virtual trophy isn't nearly enough incentive to hear Elika recant uninteresting tales of her childhood growing up in the royal palace, or hear the latest round of the two characters's never ceasing argument about whether they were brought together by fate or coincidence.

This is, of course, a video game and not a movie, and so all of this would be easily forgivable if it was fun to play. I guess it did hold my interest enough for me to beat the game, but I beat it with a constant feeling of tedium, never really excited to see the next area or fight the next boss. Here's the basic layout of how the gameplay works: You pick an area on your map of where you want to go, and through a bunch of acrobatics you dodge all the evil black goo and get to the "Fertile Ground," which is guarded by one of four of Ahriman's servants, who you each fight six separate times in battles which are slightly different each time, but not by much. After that, the lead is healed, all the black goo disappears and you go acrobating your way around the area again to hunt for "light seeds," which are used to open up new areas.

The biggest problem with the whole game is that its just way too easy. Any time you "die", Elika will just magic you back to life, and after your character says some ridiculous one-liner, you're good to go again. If you die from a fall, you're put back on the last piece of solid ground you were on. If you die in combat, you don't even have to leave and re-enter combat; the enemy simply gets a little bit of its health bar back. Its understandable that the game gives you an infinite number of lives, because some of the big chains of moves that you have to put together to climb up to an area at some point can be tricky to find out at first, but there has to be more of a penalty for dying than there is. You don't really feel like there's any pressure to get something right at any point, and its very rare that you'll need more than a couple chances to get through any given area.

Combat is a little bit tougher to get through than the climbing/jumping sections, but not really in a good way. It feels very "rock-paper-scissorsy." After fighting the first couple forms of each enemy in which you can pretty much do whatever you want, the enemies start to transfer between different "states", at which point only one of your types of attacks (each face button is a different attack) will hurt it. Really, all you need to do to beat any given battle is to deflect the enemy's attack at the right time and then immediately counter by spamming whatever button corresponds to the "state" until the enemy gets its composure back and you have to hit the block button again. They try and make it more interesting by having certain events happen if you have the enemy up against a wall or on the edge of the platform you're on, and every once in a while you'll lock swords or something and have to mash Square to break out of it. Even these get extremely repitative though, and happen often enough to the point where the combat feels even more scripted and simplisitc. Really the only reason why combat can be a little bit difficult is because of how much life enemies have, and if you botch blocking once it may take a while to get back into a rhythm. But that's all it really is is repeating the same rhythm of moves over and over again. In the pause menu there's a big tree of combo moves you can do, but I never bothered to figure them out because they were never once necessary. Just spamming one attack would generally get the job done.

A lot of the environments are great to look at, as are the bright, cell-shaded characters, but the game still feels dead at times. There are literally no other characters you meet, except yourself, Elika, the main bosses and another key player or two in the story. I realize that the premise of the game is that you're restoring a long abandoned city, but would it have hurt that much to through in one wandering hermit or something to break up the monotony? Many of the areas quite similar as well. After the initial few, you can complete areas in pretty much any order, which I guess works to make the game less linear, but it also prevents the game from having any real progression that makes you anxious to keep getting farther in, and makes reaching each new area seem like an acomplishment. The final battle, if it can be called as much, is tremendously unsatisfying, as is the ending which would seem to literally erase pretty much everything you accomplished while playing the game. Maybe this isn't actually the case, and it will be elaborated on further in the sequel, but, frankly, unless the gameplay is totally different, I don't see myself playing the sequel. A huge disappointment.