Prince of Persia: Warrior Within Review

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is the follow-up to last year’s Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The latter received a huge amount of critical acclaim, but didn’t sell as well as the developers hoped. So this year, they decided to release a follow-up that is darker and “more mature”. In addition to that, they beefed up the fighting mechanic, and increased the overall length. Although not all these changes are for the better, it is nice to see developers taking chances with sequels and not necessarily going with a sure thing.

The story in the game is simple yet compelling. In last year’s game, the prince unleashed the Sands of Time upon the world, which basically transformed everyone but him, a girl, and a nasty vizier into mindless monstrosities. However, he used his handy dagger of time to reverse time to before he unleashed the Sands. This wasn’t good enough for the supreme being called “Dahaka”, which is charged with making sure no one messes with the timeline. So, for several years, the Dahaka has been mercilessly stalking our poor prince.

No longer a gentle-hearted youth, the prince is now a dark-hearted, devil may care warrior. His only goal: to go back in time to prevent the sands of time from being made, creating a time paradox that results in him never having messed with the sands, and thus the Dahaka would have no beef with him. Although it’s hard to care for this badass, dark-hearted prince, you can’t help wanting that he will somehow succeed in his quest. Literally every character you meet in the game will tell you that it’s impossible to change your fate, but the prince doesn’t care, he strives to achieve the impossible. The compelling story will keep you intrigued through the several twists and turns it takes.

The graphics are spectacular. The prince and all the enemies are well rendered and all their actions are fluidly animated and motion captured. The environments are appropriate and are also well done. In the game you’ll travel between the past and present. In the past, the game takes on the sort of happy, light-bloomy look of last year’s game. However, in the present, the environments you’ll be traveling in are far more run down and gritty looking. This sharp contrast is very refreshing when you travel between the past and the present. A nice touch is that when you are being chased by the Dahaka, you’ll notice your screen turning greyer as the Dahaka approaches, because of the being’s dark energy. The pre-rendered cutscenes that tell the story are well presented. Oddly, all of the subtitled text is in all capitals. It’s like they were trying to be more “hardcore” by writing them like that.

The audio in the game is decent, especially all the sound effects of the swords clashing and slashing. The voice acting in the game isn’t too bad or too good, just average. In times of a dramatic battle, hard rock music will burst in. Those who have played the original will be likely surprised at this, as the original was a light hearted game with excellent Arabian music. I guess this is all keeping with the bad boy theme, or something. It just feels out of place in a game that involves so many somewhat slow-paced puzzle elements. It also seems like they used the same 4 second loop for most of the game. Sometimes during boss battles, they’ll play a slight variation of it, but it’s silly they didn’t include more tracks or styles of music.

The gameplay in the game is what truly shines. The first half of it consists of platforming. The prince is a very agile person, and can run up walls, run horizontally on them, balance on beams, perform death defying leaps, swing on poles, and other impressive maneuvers. These moves are very easy to do, and look fantastic. You’ll be able to guide the prince through complicated puzzle-ridden environments with minimal frustration thanks to his power to reverse time. This is the most standout feature of the two recent Prince of Persia games. This time around though, you also have the power to slow down time allowing you to more easily complete time based puzzles. You’ll begin with three “sand tanks” to power these time-based skills, and you’ll slowly be able to gain more. To fill up these sand tanks, all you have to do is kill enemies, or break randomly scattered pots and vases.

The twist this time around is that you’ll explore the island you’re on in both the past and the present. It’s kind of like the light and dark side in Zelda: A Link to the Past. The difference between the two time periods isn’t that significant, which makes it feel like the developers wanted to prolong the gameplay time without designing brand new levels. It does make a lot of sense within the context of the story, though. The problem with this system is the abandonment of the linear structure of last year’s game. What this means is that you’ll be traveling through the same parts of the island multiple times in both time periods, and you’ll be doing some of the puzzles 3 to 4 times. This really gets to be a bother near the end of the game.

The other part of the game is the fighting. The fighting engine has been beefed up, and is no longer a one button mashing affair. You now have combos that you’ll need to execute if you want to successfully defeat the enemies. The best part is that all of these combos look slick, and are fun to use. The new combat engine is a welcome addition, because the fighting system in the first game was admittedly weak. What this means though, is that you’ll also have a lot more enemies to fight this time around. The enemy AI doesn’t put up much of an intelligent fight and attacks in predictable patterns, especially the bosses. Yes, the focus in the game has now switched from puzzle solving to battling enemies.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because you have a lot of cool new moves. For example, you could run up a wall, do a flip off, and bring hell down on any enemy unfortunate enough to be below you. Or, you could propel yourself like a torpedo off a wall, sword first, of course. If you don’t like using your environment, you could do a flip off an enemy’s face, roll behind him, and throw him into a nearby crowd of enemies. Maybe you want to do a flip off his face, steal his weapon, and proceed to stab him in the chest? Choices are wonderful.

Speaking of stealing weapons, the prince has the power to dual-wield swords this time around. In his last adventure, he carried a sword and a dagger. Now with no dagger to weigh him down, he can pick up any stray weapon and hold it in his free hand. This adds a fun dimension to the game because you can pick up some secret weapons, which amusingly enough include a pink flamingo. Kicking giant monster butt with a pink flamingo cannot be described in words.

The gameplay isn’t without its flaws though. Near the end of the game, you will be doing an insane amount of backtracking. It’s clear that they wanted to stretch at least 15 hours of gameplay out of a 10 hour game. Also, it’s quite obvious that Ubisoft shipped the game out before it was ready. There are a slew of annoying bugs, including a bug that would spoil a major plot twist for you. In addition to that, there is a bug near the end of the game that will completely impede further progress. In fact, loading from an earlier save won’t even fix it. Literally 5 minutes from the end of the game, you may be subject to this annoying bug which will force you to restart the game from the beginning. For my review play-through of this game, I was unfortunate enough to encounter this bug. Ubisoft should definitely not have shipped a game with such a humongous flaw.