RETRO – The princes of fairy tales always win the hand of their beloved and live happily ever after… But this is not that fairy tale: the beloved Farah is neither famous nor dead, and the Prince is pursued through space and time by a terrifying, unstoppable monster that will not rest until it has dismembered our hero. No matter what the Prince does, his fate is about to be fulfilled: he will die… A few days late, we can send a happy 20th birthday to one of the most characterful games in the Prince of Persia franchise, as Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was released on 4 December 2004.

 

As the all-knowing old friend of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within said: he who unleashes the sands of time must surely die. The young aristocrat of Sands of Time, when a magician’s scheming unleashed the time sands that turn everyone into a horror with the dagger of time. The Duke had used a clever trick at the end of the previous episode to “rewind” time to undo events, but in doing so had unwittingly created Dahaka, a manifestation of Fate that will eventually kill the Prince by assuming the body of an invincible monster.

 

 

Since it is “Fate” itself, our hero’s death is fateful, unless he can avoid the inevitable with some desperate idea. The Persian Prince therefore sets out to find the legendary island where the Sands of Time are said to have been created. Somehow, by returning to the past and destroying the giant hourglass containing the cursed grains, he will stop the chain of events that led to his death. Whether or not he succeeds in this ambitious little feat depends, of course, on the skill of the kindly player…

 

 

Black without sugar

 

So that’s the starting point for last year’s most critically acclaimed outdoor action-adventure game. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time could have been the 2003 Game of the Year in my opinion, and in the unanimous opinion of the critics, as it won various awards and a very high percentage of magazine reviews.

And rightly so: there have been few games in recent times that have packed so many great innovations into them, whether it’s the time rewind, the ingeniously crafted skill/puzzle challenges, or the extremely spectacular and great combat system – all of which is complemented by a pretty female character who is always there to help, and a really charming storyline that includes a romantic love story between the two of them and a rivalry for the dagger of time.

 

 

We also considered the SoT to be a real masterpiece, so we deservedly rewarded it with a very high and rarely awarded 96%. Unfortunately, the wheels of marketing and the games market don’t always grind properly: despite the unanimous ovation of the trade press, the game didn’t sell as much as it deserved, and the makers wanted to make the sequel different in many ways.

As you may already know from our previews, and from the pictures you can see here, this episode is much darker: the environment surrounding the Duke is much, much more sinister, his opponents are more gruesome, and the protagonist himself is no longer the flaky-chinned youngster we saw in SoT, but a tough-faced, fierce-looking, scarred macho warrior. In addition, while there is no Silent Hill horror atmosphere, some of the locations are downright creepy, especially when you’re in the past, in ruined, dirty kazamas.

 

 

An usher would have a stroke…

 

While we’re on the subject, it’s also worth a look at the game’s only major location, the gigantic, ancient fortress on the Isle of Time. The word ‘only’ might shock new Prince players, but Sands of Time veterans will know that this doesn’t mean you’ll be wandering around the same rooms all the time.

As in the previous section, the huge building is made up of completely separate, often radically different parts, corridors, rooms and halls. Amongst other things, we can wander through the stale, dirty, dark corridors, richly decorated throne rooms, a gigantic water mill with life-threatening spinning wheels, and lush gardens with lush vegetation.

 

The developers had an amazing sense and imagination in designing the castle: the rooms that welcome the Prince are not only dazzlingly elaborate and eye-catching, but they are designed with the profit of a real medieval architect. Of course, the beauty of the halls would be worthless if they weren’t packed with elements to get our hero from point A to point B.

In Sands of Time, we first saw how cleverly the developers at Ubisoft Montreal could place various protruding bars that allowed our hero to glide like a circus performer to dizzying heights, as well as other protruding ledges, switches on walls and many other – by default ordinary – landmarks that barely helped him to keep going. It was a huge sense of achievement as we first scratched our heads “well, what the hell am I supposed to do here?”, then finally figured out the solution and planned the hair-raising series of stunts our hero had to perform to continue.

 

 

Use your head! (While you still have it…)

 

After seeing more and more “warrior” videos and trying out the action-focused demo, many feared that Prince of Persia: Warrior Within will be a simple hack’n’slash… Well, good news for those of you who, like me, enjoyed the “exploration”, route-finding, logic/agility part of the game: the makers have added at least three more shovels to the sequel!

You’ll have to scour and puzzle your way through the staggering size of the rooms to find and exploit the right one among the thousands of landmarks, and avoid traps even more deadly and fificult than the ones in the movie “Cube”. All it takes is one miscalculated acrobatic move, one miscalculated and misplanned route, and our hero doesn’t even have to worry about Dahaka…

 

 

A few new items have been added to the list of usable landmarks. In the very first ship map in the demo (and in the trailers), we’ve already seen the Duke sliding down the sail line with his sword, and using this elegant method to slow his fall to a landing with his ribs intact. (For the wormers: the sail was no good anyway, considering the ship was already gone and the crew slaughtered)

Well, this is a trick you’ll have to use quite often during the game, when you slide down from the top of the walls, cutting through the long, dangling, ornate flags. The makers have even taken care to leave a trace of the ‘damage’: once down, you can watch the lightweight material swing on, splitting in two in the middle. Another tool that can be used is a rope, also hanging on the walls. (Let’s not get involved: why is there a rope hanging in the middle of a castle…)

 

 

When we run on the wall, we can grab them and immediately swing ourselves onwards: if our reflexes are fast enough, we can do it in a single movement. The icing on the cake is that you can even use one hand to punch enemies while swinging, and sometimes you need to, as cat-skilled vampiresses like the Duke sometimes like to run at you to push you off the wall and into the abyss.

The second part is much harder in terms of the skill/logic parts, but they are not – in general – frustratingly unclear. If you do die as a result of a miscalculated series of stunts, you can use a single sphere of the sands of time to ‘rewind’ events to the exact point at which the ‘accident’ occurred. So we have time, except when…

 

 

Huge, cruel and angry as hell …

 

Dahaka, the brutal, invincible monster is chasing our hero! Fighting against the gigantic golem of Fate is futile, and the Prince resorts to the only possible battle tactic: he puts his legs around his neck and flees desperately like a bullet fired. More correctly, we run with him… indeed, instead of watching the headlong slog in the form of guides, we must ourselves slash through the deadly obstacles at lightning speed, or we will instantly become Dahaka delicacies.

At the start of the chase, the screen goes grey, our throats constrict, and the Godsmack band’s upbeat, metallic “I stand alone” kicks in, and we have to run around traps in a split second, over chasms and obstacles where we usually have plenty of time to wonder which way to go, but this time the giant golem is always there, panting and roaring behind us, rattling and banging!

It’s a guaranteed adrenaline rush: it’s like being injected into your bloodstream! Of course, you’ll have to leave your teeth a couple of times: the Dahaka chases are some of the hardest parts of the game (especially the later ones, the first two are not so bad).

 

 

If you have to kill

 

Fortunately, as impossible as it is to take on Dahaka, we can do just as well when fighting his minions: the various skull-wearing, flashing-eyed zombie warriors, hellhounds, vampire women and other horrors that attack our hero, one by one or in groups.

The key to our success is the much-publicised “freeform figthing” combat system, which allows us to apply the most advanced acrobatic combat skills in a completely intuitive way. While you can still use combos like in any action TPS, the fundamental difference is the way you can modify your moves at any time: there’s almost nothing scripted in combat, it’s all situational.

 

 

What do I mean? Well, for example, a sequence of moves that starts by grabbing the enemy from behind does not always have to end in one method, but can be completed in at least four or five and a half. If you have one, for example, and there aren’t too many of them attacking you at once, you can slice your man in two from behind by the waist, or even strangle him, or even decapitate him with one or two swords (great feeling!), or if you’re standing on the edge of a cliff with your back to the ground, you can waddle over your back and throw the poor screaming ficko into the abyss. When you’re surrounded by masses of bloodthirsty monsters, you can use two sabres to perform spins and slashes that would put Far Eastern martial artists to shame, but you can also do amazing things with a single blade.

By jumping into the air, for example, you can kick one of your opponents into two other opponents, giving you a bit of breathing space to push them over and deal with the others. But that’s all! The real fun comes from making the most of the terrain: jumping against the wall, flying backwards in the air, impaling your opponents by flying, spinning around the pillars to decapitate them one by one, or running around the side of the wall to do the same. I could go on for sentences about the acrobatic moves that humiliate Zorro, or any other adventurous hero, but I’d advise everyone to experience the Duke’s fighting technique for themselves.

 

 

Not just for octopuses

 

“Nice, nice,” some of you may say, “we’ve seen some of this in videos, but how does it work in the game, how easy is it for an ordinary humanoid with ten fingers to perform these feats?” Well, I’m not going to sugarcoat it: a gamepad is even more necessary for the perfect Warrior Within experience than it was for the first part. While you can learn and execute combos with a keyboard, my experience (having tried both extensively, as I kept pushing the game so much that I occasionally exhausted the Logitech’s rechargeable stylus batteries for the infrared) is that you can more easily excel with a good gamepad in your hand.

Even if you don’t have one, you don’t have to fall on your sword, because although there are a relatively large number of keys to remember, they are generally logically arranged and can be handled smoothly after a while. Personally, the only thing that bothered me a bit was the mouse rotation of the camera: somehow it’s not as good as in Max Payne 2, for example, but in the long run, it’s something you can get used to.

 

 

Speaking of the camera, unfortunately the handling of the views isn’t always perfect – in fact, I remember having less of a problem with it in the previous episode. The camera shifts were particularly annoying in two cases. The first was when you run into a narrow room with your hero to continue climbing up a switch on the wall, when you go into top view and your hero goes “crazy”: no matter which way you move the lever, he can’t follow the movement of the gamepad.

It’s not so bad, of course, because in this situation you simply stop inside, put the camera behind the Duke’s back, and start the operation all over again. But it’s even more annoying when I’m running away from Dahaka because of the wrong viewpoint and fall into the abyss because I simply can’t see what’s in front of me – as if the Prince can just about dodge the golem, but the cameraman can’t…

This part isn’t easy anyway, but when it was made even more difficult by the camera shenanigans, it made me wonder what the developers’ mothers did for a living…

 

 

Plants and monsters

 

Then I always thoroughly sucked back my curse words when I was “in love” with the grafike again and again. As it’s a game that will be released on all three consoles (Xbox, PS2, GameCube) as well as PC, I was a bit worried that it wouldn’t be the right one for us. Well, my fears were completely unfounded: at 1600*1200 resolution, Warrior Within will make even the most casual gamer gasp with everything set to max.

A couple of times I stopped and looked around, swinging on the top of a protruding plank, to admire the cracked, cobwebbed, moss-strewn, incredibly detailed halls of the huge, ancient fortress castle, or the sunlight streaming through the rose window of the library filled with millions of books.

 

 

It wasn’t very clear from the preview images, but fortunately, in addition to the dark places, there are also bright exterior scenes: for example, clinging to the lush rock walls, we can gaze at the sunlit sea lapping below, the huge ship anchored on the shore, or the parts of the fortress that are visible further up.

Since we’re obviously not talking about something on the level of Far Cry, you can see from the grafik that the ships and castle wings in the distance are not real objects, but the illusion is still almost perfect and the panorama is eye-catching. (This part is worth showing to the sidebars that have been neglected because of the game.)

 

 

The monsters found in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within are also much more elaborate than in Sands of Time. Most striking are the various versions of the skull-headed zombie soldiers and the grey-skinned vampiresses, especially their frenetic animation (of course, I liked them best when they finally died after a long fight)

And while we’re at it, we can’t ignore the Duke’s portrayal of the culture of movement, which is quite simply stunning. Our hero doesn’t just fight with his sabres in his hands, but almost dances, flies in the air, and his movements are so lifelike.

 

 

The combat is so spectacular that even the respawning enemies didn’t bother me that much when I returned to different parts of the map. The only regret I had about the graphics was that the makers didn’t enter the now-fashionable “Who makes prettier water?” competition: after a Far Cry or a Half Life 2, you’d expect more than this transparent fluff these days.

The makers have also added a neat effect to the H2O visualisation: when I was walking with the Prince in a small pool, I noticed that not only did the ripples simply follow the movement of the waist Persian, but the water in its entire mass was moving realistically in the direction of our hero.

 

 

There is no fairy tale – just a chilling one thousand and one nights…

 

Of course, hot graphics and well-developed combat are not enough in a TPS: if it’s not backed up by a good backstory, you tend to get bored. Sands of Time last year was a big hit in this area too: not only was the basic setting spot on, but the story as a whole was a well-rounded whole, thanks to the excellently written dialogue and character development between the two protagonists, the Prince and Farah, which is a credit to the work of Jordan Mechner. (For those who don’t know: Master Mechner is not only the creator of the original Prince of Persia, but also works in the films industry. He is currently writing the screenplay for the Prince of Persia movie, which is why he has not committed to a sequel.)

The story in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is much less fabulous, with a much darker setting and a dramatic undercurrent. In addition, it was a little lacking in dialogue, as Kaileena, the female lead voiced by Monica Bellucci, unfortunately never once accompanies us on our journeys, as Farah did in Sands of Time. Because of all the solitary wandering, the story is therefore somewhat relegated to the background in the first half of the game, and it is only from the second half onwards that things really pick up.

From then on, however, there are some quite surprising twists and turns that are well embedded in the darker, more adult story, and towards the end the makers have crowned it all with a great joke. Overall, I wouldn’t say that the story of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is inferior to that of SOT, and in many ways even better, but don’t expect the same oriental, fairytale atmosphere of the previous episodes.

 

 

Metal vs. oriental

 

Keeping with the Prince of Persia: Warrior Within vibe, we can’t leave out the game’s music, which was one of the most atmospheric parts of Sands of Time, and since then composer Stuart Chatwood’s name has become almost a household word among Prince fans. The significance of the issue is illustrated by the fact that when the demo of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was released online, there was a huge outcry over the much more metallic background music than in the previous installment.

 

 

On the Prince of Persia: Warrior Within official forum, the biggest thread ever was about this issue (quite vehemently…), so it has already caught the attention of the developers. I suppose it’s good news for many that (probably thanks to the latest tweaks) metal and oriental music is now in the right proportion in the full game – although it’s true that Chatwood’s own style of music now uses more discrete motifs and more sinister or mournful melodies. The aforementioned metal band Godsmack’s “I stand alone” (featured in one of the trailers) was a great addition to the Dahaka chases, but thankfully it wasn’t pushed in the rest of the game, as it would have really killed the oriental atmosphere.

 

 

Hardcore Prince

 

I’m in a difficult position when it comes to reviewing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within… Sands of Time set the bar so high last year that it was extremely difficult to reach. To the credit of the makers, the sequel succeeded in many ways, and in many ways surpassed the previous installment.

The combat – while excellent in SoT – this time around simply trumps everything that’s ever been released on PC or console (!) – including the previous king, Ninja Gaiden on Xbox. That’s quite an achievement, especially considering that Prince is far from being a pure hack’n’slash game series, but has logical/skill elements.

 

 

It’s all great fun, of course – until you get permanently stuck on one of the overly difficult logical sections (for example, because you haven’t seen a well-hidden door or the ladder you need to get to the next level, discreetly hidden in the background), or you get mowed down by the masses of zombie soldiers and vampire women attacking at once, because the life (and this time, game-stopping) saving water fountain is miles away. While the previous installment managed to get the difficulty just right with brilliant precision, in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, unfortunately, this feat didn’t always work…

Another problem is that you can get very lost in the huge castle, and the fact that you can go in four directions from the central room makes things even more difficult, while it’s not always clear from the dialogue or the map where you’re supposed to go from there. The creators of the game have added to all this the ability to switch between two different timelines (see box), which is a huge joke on the one hand, but on the other it can make you even more confused.

 

 

The constant change of past/present is also linked to the fact that the locations will of course repeat themselves: we will return to a certain place quite a few times (and not only in another time period…), which will make the game monotonous from time to time (fortunately not too often). This whole timeline-switching, location-repeating system is eerily reminiscent of Legacy of Kain: Defiance, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s something to forget about for the third time in the next Prince or Kain. Despite its minor flaws, Warrior Within has still become my favourite TPS.

The final 94% is of course less than the 96% awarded to SoT, but that doesn’t mean that the second part was worse, it’s just that our needs change, and what surprised us last year simply “only” deserves the award for the best action-adventure game of 2004…

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-(2004)

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Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal, Pipeworks Software(PSP)

Style: Action-adventure

Release date: 2004