Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (PC)

On a fateful Thursday morning I returned home from work (I am a grown up [in body at least]) hoping beyond hope that the next instalment of the Prince of Persia had arrived, as pre-ordered. A maelstrom of thoughts was whirling through my head - what if it's crap? How could anyone top the amazing game play and sheer addictiveness of the previous instalment, the Sands of Time?

After a few tense minutes while the game installed, I was rewarded with the start up screen. I could immediately see this was the same game as before, but something was different. Darker.

After a few hiccups with my graphics card - I needed to turn off some settings to allow the game to have full control of the visual wizardry - I began to play, and was immediately swallowed up by the unfolding events. As I write this, the Prince still has far to go on his journey, yet it is plain that our mastery of weapons and the environment has grown beyond anything that I could have imagined.

The richness of the fighting style is huge. It gives you the opportunity to develop your own fighting technique and skills among the enormous possibilities of movement. Special moves are gained as progress is made further into the adventure. We can use the surroundings and even our enemies to deal out swift, dark and beautiful retribution to any who try to kill us. It takes some time to pick up, and I still don't have all the moves down - I often have a look at the combo list between save points - but I am steadily mastering the lethal skills of the Prince.

This game is better than any I have played (in my humble and slightly obsessed opinion) I have played Doom3, Halflife2 and other such titanic titles. The thing the sets this game apart to me above all the others is the freedom of movement. The Warrior Within gives you even more vertigo than Sands of Time. I love looking out over the vast open spaces, perching on the narrowest of beams with a 1000-foot drop below, marvelling at the glorious views, such as the swells of the sea against the cliffs in the distance.

As in Sands of time you are not limited to running on flat or sloping surfaces - you are a true gymnast and athlete, 'free running' up or along vertical walls, using momentum and amazing agility to get to high and out of reach places. It's beyond anything I could have dreamed I wanted in a gaming experience.

The whole tone of the game is darker than before. It's a little more violent and certainly more alluring, as some of the female cast are jaw droppingly beautiful, very well proportioned and scantily clad. In other games I tended to get a little bored but there is no danger of that here. This game is holding my interest hostage, much to my gaming widow girlfriends' dismay.

In summary - This game is cool.

The plot sees the prince trying to escape from a big mean beasty called the Dahaka who wants to kill him for releasing the sands of time, so he decides to go to some castle where the sands of time were created and stop them being created. All the while he's being pursued by the relentless Dahaka. It's nothing special, but it's clear enough that they spent no time developing the plot. No matter, plots mean nothing when the game is fun. But WW isn't fun. I shall explain.

Starting with the music - in SoT the music was mostly Indian-orchestral type stuff and sounded great, and fit the game perfectly. WW mostly uses thrashy rock music which just sounds absolutely terrible and doesn't fit the game at all. At all. Thank god you can turn off the music. The combat is also less enjoyable than it was in SoT, in WW too much emphasis has been placed on chopping the enemies in half, rather than the joys of jumping around like a crazy person and attacking with lightning fast attacks. To make matters worse (much, much worse), the prince and his enemies have a tendency to throw terrible insults at each other, that are just extremely annoying and do nothing to help the game.

For the most part, the trap-dodging side of the game remains unchanged - almost to a fault - it's precisely the same stuff as SoT, the only real new thing added for WW was the ability to slide down huge cloth banners, nothing else was added in terms of new trappery. This is both good and bad - good because SoT's gameplay was so perfect that it needn't be changed, but bad because sequels should always expand and improve on the originals. One slight problem though, if SoT was challenging yet easy, then WW is outright frustrating.

Prince of Persia has always been a game where you died all the time, but never in a previous PoP did I feel like I was being punished for no reason, I regularly thought to myself "this is not fun, at all". And that's a big problem - games are meant to be fun, challenging, sure, but they must be fun. WW is outright tedious on regular occasions. The traps are too unforgiving and water (health) is too sparse. It was an intelligent move having fixed save points in SoT, but WW would have *really* benefited from a qucksave feature.

The game also features periodic bosses, they are giant golem type creatures that you have to knock to their knees then leap up onto their backs and hit them in the head! The first time you kill one, it's an amazing experience - but there are loads of them and every encounter is the same, and it quickly becomes tiresome. If SoT was too short, WW is too long! At about 15 hours long, it's longer than most games these days, but at about the half way point I found myself just wishing it would end.

Visually, the game looks every bit as good as SoT, which means it looks great - it's not going to challenge even a mid-range PC to its limits, but it does look good and people who live for eye-candy won't be disappointed. Barring the music and insults, the sound is every bit as good as SoT's was, meaning it's also great.

All that said, and faults aside, PoP:WW still retains most of the elements which made SoT such a classic, and you certainly can enjoy it as it holds some enjoyable combat, interesting puzzles and excellent traps, but in my opinion the bad outweighs the good.

Prince of Persia 1 and 2 and Sands of Time were defining platform games in their time. Prince of Persia 3D turned out to be a flop, and in my opinion, Warrior Within is just as bad. Hopefully the upcoming Prince of Persia 3 will fix Warrior Within's problems. If you haven't played a modern PoP game, buy Sands of Time right now. If you've played Sands of time, but are hungry for more - try WW - but be warned, it plays like an angry teenager.