Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands

The last couple Prince of Persia games had left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, I had finished 3, and abandoned the “artsy” reboot that came out last year near the end. The media was saying all the right things about this game to me, not the least being that it had returned to the formula that made 1 and 2 so good. If this turns out to be true then I think I’m going to love this game.

The story here isn’t a big departure from the rest of the series, I don’t want to say it’s serviceable because I don’t think that is doing it enough justice but it’s not outstanding thats for sure. It suits the game very well I found and does give you enough motivation to keep going. The prince himself is his usual “witty” or rather sarcastic self… I said to myself more than a couple times, “this guy is an idiot” but if you can comes to terms with that early enough you can get a chuckle out of a few of his one-liners.

“Prince of Parkour” is at the most basic of levels a platform puzzle game, yhe platforming is 3 fold; you will often walk into a big room where you will get a pan of the pathway to get to door usually several floors up. There isn’t much thinking about where to go in these rooms. It usually means finding the pillar or platform you can reach, and move the only way you can from there, rinse and repeat. The challenge here comes from your abilities coming into play. For example, you’ve probably seen the water freezing stuff from the promos or videos elsewhere, it comes down to timing, sometimes the next spout isn’t on when you froze the first one, so as you jump for spout 1, you need to release the freeze button wait for the next spout to start pumping and freeze it again before you get there. This all happens in a fraction of a second. There are several ways that they use the water to get in the way.

how to swing on water...

The second way they use platforming is through narrow trap laden corridors that depend purely on timing, you run, jump, and climb your way around saw blades, swinging axes, spikes on the floor, swinging spiked beams. and spinning rotating poles with blades on them… none of this is new to the franchise but they do throw some tricky ones at you, and if you don’t have rewinds available you may actually die here… luckily you’re never really far from a check point.

The final is by way of switch and lever puzzles to open doors. Luckily they are few and far between, I think there was maybe 5 or 6 of them through the entire course of the game, none overly challenging, and I think I only found one or two of them to be tedious.

Between platforming you spend your time in “Prince of Pottery-rage” busting any (what may be priceless) vase you cross trying collect red and blue floaty orbs, to refill your health and ability meters, if the orbs float and go right towards you anyway… whats the point of destroying the priceless artifact?.. no manners thats why… the prince is just another “entitled” rich kid I guess…

Fully leveled whirlwind ability... potent

There is also some combat in “Prince of Push-Square”, it’s not a fantastic fighting system, you get a sword and a kick button, and there is some variety in the baddies that change how you should fight them. To help you can learn abilities when you collect enough yellow orbs to level up… to be honest I only ever used the whirlwind, once that was maxed out it was pretty effective at controlling the room. It’s like a built in Dynasty Warriors mini-game that you used to replenish your health and abilities meters and give you some sense of character progression. It was definitely fun in the small doses it’s given to you in. I even enjoyed the challenge mini-games that unlock when you complete the game. I think it can get by with this minimal combat system because it’s not the whole game, it doesn’t need a stellar combat system like say, Arkham Asylum did.

When it’s all said and done, I had a GREAT time with this game, it’s so rare that I can say a game delivered exactly what I wanted it too, especially since it was so far removed from the last version of the game that used that formula. I’ve got to say, if you played the original Prince of Persia on the last gen consoles and enjoyed it, you are going to love this game. Conversely, if you didn’t like the early PoPs, this probably isn’t for you. If you missed those games, and only played the last couple, I think this is a great one to get on board with. There really aren’t any other games that quite compare to PoP, and I think you’d be doing yourself a disservice for passing on it.

The original Assassin’s Creed was a good game, but it suffered from repetitive gameplay, and some downright awful missions for an open world style game that depends on a good variety.  The hype has indicated that this would not be the case this time around, but I went in with quite a bit of skepticism.

For those new to the Assassin’s Creed series, the story is actually a Sci-Fi tale, where you play a present day Desmond, reliving the lives of his ancestors by way of a device called the Animus. In the sequel Desmond’s journey in the past is one of revenge, one spanning 30 years (or there abouts) of the life of Ezio, a young Italian turned assassin. Ezio’s story is decent as you track down those who have earned your vengeance. Not a terribly unique story, nor is it very fleshed out, it was simply kill target A who tells you about target B, and so on. It is entertaining enough to drive you through however. Ezio’s story is clearly fictional but its characters are based on real people which gives a certain level of believability to it, and it’s nice when you run into familiar names and whatnot. On the other hand, Desmond’s story and how it all ties together wasn’t very compelling to me, and I’m generally into that sort of sci-fi type of thing.

There is a LOT of Italian in the English dialog, you’d be wise to enable the subtitles right away if you’re playing in English. To be fair all of the Italian used in the dialog is mostly just flavor text and not specifically part of the story, so you can play with the subtitles off and not miss anything important and it really does add to the immersion of the experience. What you do miss out on is the opportunity to learn some naughty Italian phrases.

The environments are huge and it is very clear that a lot of time and care was spent building them, the flow navigating them is pretty fun too once you get used to looking for key features (such as chimneys and extended planks to hop to) and lets you get around fairly quickly, but its no Spiderman 2, which is the pinnacle of open world travel IMO. With the exception of the landmark structures that are unique and beautifully crafted (and from what I understand close resemblances of their real life counterparts), I found much of the world to look the same, and I think because of the color palette they used, dull, so I never really had a strong sense of where I was in the world without pulling up my map, unless I was near one of afore mentioned landmarks. The climb patterns on many of the buildings were very similar if not identical, especially when you are nearing the end of the game. I can understand that reusing the building assets is necessary, but I had hoped that at least when it came to the view points that they’d be somewhat unique, even if it was just a change in how you climb it.

It’s worth mentioning as well Ezio has some pretty sweet looking armor, and there are several different colors you can dye them to suit your style or just to change the pace a bit. It was a nice touch, ubi didn’t really have to do that since the armor changes pretty frequently anyway.

The gameplay held up for the duration just about, at the end of my first play through I was pretty much bored and had had enough of it.  The combat was alright nothing outstanding, though some of the animations were well done, and some of them are really cool to see, trying out each weapon to see them all was definitely worth while. It implements the same sort of counter system that was in the first one, and you learn through the plot and can pay to learn different dodge/evade skills as well as different weapon attacks so you usually have something new to play with as you progress but it’s certainly not necessary. The same 2 button attack will get you through hordes of enemies all the way through the game. Platforming puzzles were fun even though there is only one route, finding that route wasn’t always obvious which made it significantly more fun than say the platforming in Uncharted 2 which was very direct.

Ubi made good on the notion of getting rid of the mission types that weren’t fun, that’s right! no more assassin bench-sitting! (although you can whenever as an evasive maneuver and need to on rare occasions, it’s not as bad as it was) Theres enough plot missions to keep you going for a good 20 hours and although it was fairly repetitive in the end, it did sneak up on me a little. Theres enough side quests to keep you entertained if you’re not feeling the next plot mission at the moment.

They’ve also introduced an economic system. Not only do you get cash (florins) for completing quests, you can also make your own by pick pocketing pedestrians, or by taking down messengers and/or other pick pockets. On top of that, you can invest your florin into improving your villa, or rather, your uncle Mario’s villa (yes they included “Its-a me Mario” in the dialog very funny cause I didn’t see it coming at all). By investing in shops and other amenities like a bank, or a brothel, (…) you will increase your villa’s population and increase your tax income, as well as earn discounts from the shops. Every 20 mins of gameplay your taxes are thrown into a chest back at Mario’s house, the chest has a limit to how much money it can hold that scales with the tax income, it works out that you have to go back every hour to clean it out or you stop accumulating.

There are too many collectibles in this game, but best out of all of them are the glyphs, which basically open up puzzles that reward short video clips. Some interesting back (or fore, depending on how you look at it) story is told in the puzzles themselves about the history to present day of the Templars and Assassin’s, as well as unlocking a very cool ‘origin’ type story. If you’re going after any of the collectibles, I strongly recommend these. Apart from that there are 6 statuettes for cash, paintings that you can purchase from art vendors in the different cities, and 100 feathers… which for you trophy/achievement hunters is going to be an annoyance since its’ directly tied to three of them. Finally 6 assassin’s seals that unlock Altair’s armor, the seals are obtained from assassin’s tombs throughout the game, and represent some of the coolest game play sections of the game, solid platforming puzzles, and/or combat zones. If you’re doing these I’d recommend spacing them out as opposed to going right after them because they’re excellent when you need a break from the main story line.

From what I understand my decision to play this on PS3 really hurt me here, as the 360 version is being reported as the superior version. There were noticeable frame rate issues, screen tearing, and it seemed like the draw-in distance was far too short in general because of all the pop-in I experienced, all of which I understand are fine in the 360 version. On top of that there were 4-5 instances while I was progressing through the story (about 22-25 hrs of game play) that the PS3 would freeze requiring hard reboot of the system. Furthermore, I learned while trophy hunting (there is a trophy for killing 10 baddies w/o getting hit) that I can replicate the crash on demand by throwing down a smoke bomb in a crowd of people and performing a couple double executions, there seems to be many reports of this on the forums and my own attempts to contact Ubi support has been far less than rewarding with regards to acknowledging that there is even a problem.

In any case, the game is decent and if you’re a fan of the first one this game is simply more and better you’ll have a great time, I found this game to be pretty generic in the end and a fairly forgettable experience in the sea of good games that have come out recently despite the amazing world that they’ve built and set it in. I’m extremely disappointed to say that I would have a hard time recommending this game to anyone as a must play title this year.

This game is breaking sales records like mad, 4.7 million copies on day one, people were pretty excited for this game. Even some news about broken street dates and all kinds of shenanigans. I’m going to break the review into single and multiplayer because the difference is really night and day.

Single Player

[Author Note: The single player campaign is pretty hard to talk about without hitting spoilers at all I may disclose environments, but not locations, and impact of scenarios but not details of the plot, I apologize if I've said something that you would consider a spoiler]

Wow, what an experience, the action here is was totally relentless, it feels like they took the 5 good episodes of a season of 24, cut everything to do with character development, tied it to a first person shooter and shipped it. Sounds great doesn’t it? Well it’s not really.

With regards to the story it seemed like the motto here was shock the player with some very extraordinary circumstances. The background for the most part is delivered between missions through dialog played over top of a map showing where your mission is taking you, I found them forgettable for the most part. The rest of the story is delivered through the mission itself, and the banter from your commanding officer. The story itself is epic when it gets right down to it, there is a lot going on, and there certainly can be a lot of emotion to be felt there… including ‘discomfort’ which I find to be an unusual word to use when reviewing a game. This leads me to my biggest problem with this game. The entire single player experience on the normal difficulty is completely in roughly 5 hours, thats way too short, the effort to make it intense as it was tells me that it wasn’t just a toss in, but it wasn’t long enough to be of value in my opinion.

You aren’t given much of an opportunity to build a relationship with these characters so the plot as it relates to these characters doesn’t really have an impact like you’d expect. I had the same relationship to the named AI fodder as I did with plot characters, and in most cases the player character as well. That was definitely a big detractor for me, a lot of … “oh this is happening now?.. oh well” moments.

As far as gameplay goes this is more or less your standard fare first person shooter, they’ve introduced a “snap targetting” system, which essentially translates to; if you’re close to a target when you look down your sights, you’ll be on the target by the time you get there which can make for some very quick combat, but a lot of the time it feels like cheating. It actually got to the point of annoyance for me because it seemed at points that they overloaded areas with baddies beyond what I felt were their capacity. On top of that they seemed to spawn in waves from areas you may have already cleared which was sort of frustrating. Some of my favorite parts of the game are when you are asked to breach some walls with enemies behind them, you go into a “bullet-time” sequence for a few seconds when you have to scan around to shoot bad guys, while avoiding hostages and what not, very good moments for sure.

Some of the environments are original and very fun, for example, one of the missions takes you into the middle of suburbia and your moving from house to house locking things down, and various objectives in a block between restaurants pretty fast paced I think that was my favorite mission.

I would have a really hard time recommending this game to anyone like myself who primarily plays games for the single player experience. For the most part I avoid playing online with strangers, mostly because hearing kids yell into their microphones is never fun to me. It’s just too short, and kind of “meh”, but go ahead and rent it for the epic-ness that it is. definitely worth $5 for the weekend and not $60.

Mulitplayer

It wouldn’t be fair to simply discuss the single player for this game, it is clear (painfully for single player fans if you’ve read the rest of my review) that the focus of this title is the multiplayer.

I put close to 20 hours into it so far mostly into a mode called “ground wars” which is simply a mix of team deathmatch and domination game modes. The maps were solid most with some form of vertical element to them all of them were easy to pick up but usually fairly tricky to find the hot spots.

The attachment/perk carrot is still as compelling as it was in the predecessor, and they come a pretty steady pace early on so you feel like you’re succeeding even in defeat. For those who don’t know, as you level up your character and use weapons and attachments you gain access to new weapons and attachments, like a new machine gun, or one of several types of scope attachments, silencers, shotgun or grenade launchers, heartbeat monitors etc.. so you end up with lots of options when it comes to customizing your load out for each map. My personal favorite load out at the moment is to equip the bling perk (2 attachments on your primary weapon), I use the heartbeat monitor, and a silencer on my m4, and for a secondary weapon a silenced shotgun… I go sneaking around trying to shoot people in the back… very fun… with this example I hope to demonstrate that Ive customized my load out to suit my play style… I could have easily gone with sniper rifles, quick reloads, recoil reduction and what not and may depending on my mood for the day! In any case this level of customization adds so much fun to the game.

The match making isn’t great, when I was getting started I saw a full team of people less than level 5 playing against a full group of players closer to level 20… very one sided, that seems to have leveled off as there are more players playing, and it can be kind of slow to get into games, there is a fair amount of drops it seems, and usually only happens when you’ve only got 30 mins to play or something but all in all, these can be forgiven. The game lacks a ‘mute all’ button which would have made my day, I spend the first part of each round filtering out the people with crazy background noise or screaming kids… I really hate that about online console gaming. Ahhh well.

In terms of multiplayer this game is awesome, the recommendation is simple here, if you like first person shooters for online play, this is likely the game of the year for you… If you’re like me and only kind of interested in the multiplayer to play once in a while, I think you’ll still get your moneys worth out of this one, it is a good time to be sure, and probably shouldn’t be missed.