Prince of Persia

So I finally got around to finishing this game tonight, and I have to say it’s pretty amazing.  Figured I’d post some impressions of what I thought of this reboot of the Prince of Persia series.

First off, the graphics of this game are really impressive.  Instead of shooting for realism, Ubisoft went for a “make the game look like the concept art” approach, and totally succeeds.  It’s kind of a cell-shading meets watercolor thing, and fits with the fantasy setting.

The primary focus is on the platforming, something which a lot of people whinged about the fact that the overall platforming experience is pretty easy.  In a way it is, but it’s easy in an enjoyable way.  You’re frequently faced with traversing areas with a sequence of timed jumps and specific button presses (kind of quick time event-ish in a way), and watching the Prince and his companion Elika doing these moves looks great.   Yeah it’s not a hardcore experience, but the animations are extremely fluid, and doing roof crawls, ring flips, wall jumps and more looks just really badass.  There’s no real way to die either, since Elika will magically save you from falling to your death.

Now that may make it sound ridiculously easy, but all it really does is save you the annoyance of having to do a load of a saved game all the time.  It’s very fluid, and keeps you in the game.

Combat’s challenging, with each area boss requiring their own specific strategies to beat.  You can’t just hammer the attack buttons though, or else they’ll mop the floor with your face.  If you’re about to die, Elika will save you like she does when you’re platforming, but the balance here is the enemy gains a lot of health as well.

The story’s pretty good, and the voice acting is excellent which adds a lot to the dialogue scenes.  The lead actor for the Prince is the same guy from Uncharted, so expect some similar cocky chatter that’ll make you chuckle.

Definitely going to play this through some more so I can whore for trophies, but if you’re looking for a pretty accessible game that’s a lot of fun and has some top notch production values you might want to check this one out.