Prince of Persia sucks
There, I said it. The new Prince of Persia game isn’t a 90%+ game, much less the 95% and up it’s been getting.
The game looks fucking AMAZING, especially in motion, but the gameplay just isn’t there to back it up. It’s all sizzle and no steak, and while that combination will keep you occupied for a while, in the end you’re left hungry for something with substance and generally unsatisfied with what you had.
Just speaking in terms of the gameplay, I felt like I was playing a Wii game without the seemingly-mandatory and totally fucktarded waggle mechanic that it’d have if it were to ACTUALLY be a Wii game.
The game handholds you incessantly, and often literally. You can’t fall to your death, for example, without your partner grabbing your hand and pulling you to safety. I know - I tried. I flung myself off every fucking cliff around while trying to find hidden areas or other secrets and was rescued countless times.
And I never found a single god damn secret area either.
That’s not to say there aren’t any, of course. I didn’t try climbing in every single spot and, as the developers decided they didn’t need to let the player know what spots they could vs could not climb, there’s really no way to tell if I missed something aside from trying to run up/down/across every single spot in the environment.
That kind of trial and error exploration gets boring quickly.
Speaking of getting boring quickly: COMBAT.
You get three moves to start: acrobatic attack, sword attack, and fist attack. You can combo these together, and get a fourth move soon after starting the game - magic.
That’s largely the extent of the combat all the way through the game. You attack the enemy, then block their attacks, then you attack again. Early enemies are laughably easy, though there’s really no encounter in the game that’s going to test the skills of anyone who has completed the first level of any Ninja Gaiden game ever made.
Though I said the game sucks, and it does, it’s not really a bad game. It’s just not what it could have been. It’s incredibly easy, but also incredibly good looking - a great combo in a potential date, but not so awesome for a $60 purchase (and for some of you pathetic bastards those two are probably one and the same, amirite?) at this time of year.
The game is also on the short end of the spectrum. It’s unlikely that you’ll have grown tired of the visual style by the time you finish it up but the gameplay, on the other hand, that’s another story entirely. After an hour or two, you’ve seen pretty much everything the game has to offer and it’s just a matter of getting through it to see what happens.
That’s why Prince of Persia is a game that’s worth playing, but not worth owning. It’s a solid rental at best but had the foundation in place to be so much more, falling far short of that and of my expectations.
And that’s what sucks.
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Good to know. Maybe I’ll pick it up for really cheap someday or rent it. PoP:TsoT was awesome on Xbox, though.
I’m a few hours in and I pretty much agree with everything you said.