Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones reviewed....kind of

Here we are, the end of the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy, well if you discount The Forgotten Sands which I don't know if I do since I never played it.  The story all comes together in this installment, The Two Thrones where it even attempts to weave the unnecessary manliness of Warrior Within without a retcon.  But there has to be something to mess up the works, and here I literally can not beat the Stone Guardian due to some undiscovered glitch where the Speed Kill just doesn't come up or I'm that incompetent.  And since this is around the half-way mark, I flat-out refused to do a new game so I read the game script online to finish the story and here we are.  Now let's get going with this review of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones....kind of.

You have come back from the Island of Time where the Prince changed his fate from being destroyed by The Dahaka creature.  Now it's time to head back to Babylon and rest up...except that Babylon's ON FIRE!  And there's a war going on led by the evil Vizier from the first game that you killed...wait.  Well, thanks to the WACKY HIJINKS in the last game, you never did the events of The Sands of Time which explains why the Vizier is here killing off Babylon but that's not all!  The Vizier also wishes to be a God which he accomplishes by killing Kaileena, that chick from the last game who's also the Empress of Time and in her death, she becomes The Sands of Time which makes The Vizier a God!  And The Prince also gets corrupted by The Sands which gives him a split personality that acts like Warrior Within's Prince.

It's very refreshing to see this game go back to what made Sands of Time work when it did, the fun acrobatics.  They have the same fun and fast-paced derring-do from Sand of Time without being a total chore to slog through like in Warrior Within.  There's color and life in this game again and best of all, the Prince is interesting again.  The Prince makes jokes but this time, there's pathos and depression when he looks over the destruction of his home.  It also helps that he has someone to banter with his dark side.  They have great chemistry together as the dark side wants to finish off The Vizier as quickly as possible and The Prince slowly regains his selflessness as he helps and fights for others beside himself.  But, The Dark Prince isn't voiced by the guy who voiced The Prince in Warrior Within which would have been awesome.  Not saying the guy who does voice is bad or anything but bringing in the Warrior Within guy would have been a great Continuity Nod.

But then again, there's the combat.  Once again, it's a frustrating experience when you're surrounded and the enemies keep attacking you.  But this time, blocking and dodging don't work very often.  There's too many times where I blocked only to be beaten down.  And if you want to throw your secondary weapon...good luck.  Most times you throw it in the opposite direction and that's if you were quick enough to throw it at all.  But, there is a new thing that makes combat a bit more bearable, the speed kill.  It's your stealth kill that's akin to God of War's Quick-Time Events which makes it easy and fast for you to kill the bad guys.  Granted, the timing is a bit too tight but it's a great system.

This game is actually good but barely...or at least the first half and the script is.  This rediscovers the joys of jumping with more techniques.  The voice-acting is amazing with great chemistry between the two princes.  How it weaves in Warrior Within's story is extremely clever.  The battle system still needs work but the speed kills are a great addition.  It's a pity that I couldn't beat the game but whatever, I'll live happily ever after.

7/10

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within reviewed

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

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time reviewed...the video game....the one before the movie

There are some times when I just feel like playing a damn series for some reason.  For this urge, it was the Prince of Persia Sands of Time trilogy...well, before Forgotten Sands came along but I don't think people are counting that one.  Anyways, the point is that I didn't really know what to expect.  I know you controlled time and you ran across walls.  Those things are enough for me to buy it though so here we are now diving into Prince of Perisa: The Sands of Time.

Now obviously you play as the Prince, who's just starting his warrior ways when he and his father invade some kingdom.  The Prince goes into the city for some glory and a war souvenir in which he finds the Sands of Time dagger...and some big ass hourglass.  Those things get taken back to the palace and the Prince gets to keep the dagger but with a treacherous, evil Vizier and some WACKY HIJINKS, the Sands of Time from the hourglass gets unleashed and turns almost everyone into horrible Sand Monsters.  The only "survivors" is the Prince, the evil Vizier and the conquered Princess Farrah.  And now the Prince and Farrah must navigate the palace to find the Vizier, kill him and set things right.


The big draw of this was all the fun acrobatics you could do.  You, obviously, can run across the walls.  You can do the wall jump just like in Super Mario 64.  You can swing on stuff and then hang on ledges.  And the best part of all that fun stuff is that it's all smooth and fast-paced.  There's very little slow-down when you doing these things, which is great since one moment you have to run down a wall and then the next you have to wall-jump to the next platform.  This is the part of playing this game, just doing all these stunts just brings out the MAN in me.  And then on top of that, The Prince is a very endearing character so we care about him and want him to make those jumps.  The Prince is very sardonic and has some great, funny lines.  I won't say he's one of my favorite video game characters but he's a guy I would love to see more of.

And then we come to the big flaw in this game.  A flaw so massive that it splintered into many tiny flaws.  That is the combat system which is the worst one I've played since the first Devil May Cry.  A system so frustrating that I threw my controller at the wall once or twice....or five times in utter rage.  Why this over-the-top anger?  First off, there is no auto-targeting so while you want to finish one monster, the game decides you want to attack another monster.  Then you get trapped and the monster you wanted to finish off gets back up and you have to fight him all over again.  What else....OH, the camera system is horrible.  It's not the best during the acrobatics but it gets the job done.  In combat, the camera wants to go behind barriers so you don't get to see what's going on half the time so you get combed to death by the monsters.  Which leads to my next point, the monsters catch you in a combo, kiss your ass goodbye since that's going to be the end of you.  You can't block it and if you get knocked down, they still hit you which really sucks.  But wait, you can use the Sands of Time to reverse, get this, time and get away from the onslaught right?  You can but it's so finicky that, while not useless, is a pain to get right since you have to go back to the moment of your downfall and then a little before since it takes a couple seconds for time to catch up to the player.  And you really have to hold the L button to reverse time since a light hold will have you wasting an ungodly amount of sand tanks necessary to back in time.  The there's Farrah who makes this game an escort mission half the time.  Granted, she can attack and does so with competently...she's too stupid to move.  So you can't go off picking monsters off one-by-one.  No, you have to be attached to Farrah's hips and protect her from the monsters.  Also granted, they come after you but when a few gang up on you, one goes after Farrah.  It's almost always going to be a horrible time fighting with her.

Like Devil May Cry, this game is overrated, thanks solely to the horrible combat system.  Unlike, Devil May Cry the rest of the gameplay is pretty good.  Running around and jumping is all great fun.  The Prince is a great character.  The script is great with many funny lines.  The puzzles are decent enough.  I want to like this game but the horrible combat won't let me....sorry.

6/10