After playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, I found it pleasant enough with a likable hero and fluid jumping but with a horrible combat system that broke the game, my patience and put dents in a wall. Strangely my Gamecube controller still functioned normally so go Nintendo! However, I did want to play more Prince of Persia and after my disastrous attempts at playing the original one packaged with Sands of Time, I took to the sequel Warrior Within. In it I was promised manliness, violence and Godsmack with it's M rating. I'm a man who likes his punching, steak and violence plus Godsmack has some killer songs so it's all good right? Let's find out as we kill our way into Warrior Within.
So you think everything's perfect and safe after the events of The Sands of Time where you saved most everyone from becoming horrible sand creatures? Well you're wrong since that unleashed one huge-ass problem, the Dahaka. The Dahaka is a huge beast that guards the timeline and removes things that don't belong there....like The Prince after his WACKY HIJINKS from last time. So now The Prince has to go to an island where The Sands of Time were created, prevent their creation through, get this, TIME TRAVEL...how I never quite figured out. Of course things can't be that easy since the Dahaka is chasing you there, the women all want to kill you and there's this mysterious being doing mysterious things when he's not standing there.
So all the jumping and cool acrobatics are still here & they still work just as well as The Sands of Time. However, it's been processed and generic-ized to remove most of the fun of it. They're there, you do what's required and that's it. The only time that this becomes fun and almost exciting is when The Dahaka is chasing you. In fact, this whole game has been processed and generic-ized to remove everything fun from the previous game. When you're running around, there's no sense of wonder of what you might find you just run from point A to point B. When you time travel from past to present and vice-versa, there's no real difference between some vegetation and decay. And then there's The Prince himself where every warm quality and playfulness he showed in the previous game has been replaced with generic rage. All he does his smolder, yell and be pissed off at everything except himself which makes him and his voice-acting...generic! But I will give that when he does try to be smart and plan his next smooth he sounds like a manly Speed Racer which amused me. But he does better than Monica Belluci. What? You didn't know she was in this? Well neither did I until I saw the credits and I still don't believe it! She sounds nothing like herself and she has the second biggest part in the game!
As for my biggest problem in The Sands of Time, the combat system in which I wrote in great length about, I'm a bit happy that the combat in Warrior Within is better. It's not perfect and it still gets cheap more often than not but it wasn't to the point where I was throwing my controller at the wall once or twice a day. It was like once every three or four days and I only threw it on the floor but I digress. The combat is a bit more God of War-y with combos and special attacks which is fine addition but once again, it leads to some more genericness out of the proceedings. The attacks are fine and the violence does have some visceral thrills to it especially when the camera slows down and you throwing weapons at enemies and see their heads come off.
As hard as I am to Warrior Within, it's not a horrible game but it is very generic. I mean it looks kind of pretty, the Dahaka scenes are fun, The Prince's lines are mildly amusing and the combat is noticeably better this time around. But when everything fun and unique of The Sands of Time gets replaced with generic rage, generic objectification of women and generic violence...it's kind of insulting to the ideas of manliness. And as for Godsmack, you get "Straight out of Line" in the credits and the riff to "I Stand Alone" during The Dahaka chases but the rest of the music is generic hard rock. I mean, it's OK for what it is but it's just so bland and forgettable.
5/10
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