I swear this was funnier when I wrote it.

My friend Alex asked me to put a link to his forum in my newspost. It’s a cool place and not full of idiots. The blokes from EN post there from time to time. So if you wanna check it out go visit The Grey Hall.

Now I have something very important to talk about today. I finally got around to playing the new Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (referred to from now on as WW ) game. I dunno if I mentioned it here but Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (SoT) is one of the best games I have ever played, it was graphically beautiful, had a great story, fun, had challenging (yet not annoying) puzzles and was all round a brilliant game. The only small niggle was that the combat was a little boring, but the combat was never the point of the game. The point was figuring out how to dodge traps, and using your ninja-like abilities to get to the top of the room using flags poles, wall runs, switches, and whatever else you needed to do. Figuring it out had a great sense of accomplishment and DAMNIT it was just really cool to do a wall run, jump to flag pole, swing on it up to a beam, walk along the beam, jump acorss a gap, jump to a column and then swining on a rope to the end of that section.

In PoP: WW. They shit on all the good bits, stick in a stupid plot with a shitload of plotholes make it more combat focused and then stick in a crappy heavy metal soundtrack (this coming from someone who likes heavy metal). God damnit Ubisoft! Why? Oh wait, I suppose to make it appeal to a more mainstream audience. But in doing so, you’ve just pissed on all the people who enjoyed your first game and sang its praises!

Lets look at the main character, the Prince (no he never did get a proper name). In SoT the prince was likeable, quick-witted and a nice guy trying to put things right. In WW, we’ve got an arrogant prick who grunts, swears and who is concerned with nothing but saving his own arse. Now this “bad ass” character is something I might like, but it’s all to do with the context. The guy is just not likeable the way guys like Wolverine or Master Chief but it’s forced down your throat so violently you can’t help but hate him. He grunts and shouts witty phrases such as “YOU BITCH!” and sounds like someone chucked a razor down his throat. See in EN Lothars a prick and will tell you to fuck off but he’s an OK guy sometimes and someone not without his redeeming qualities. The only redeeming quality the Prince has in this game is that the story keeps saying he’s going to die.

Next the gameplay, it remains mostly unchanged from SoT and they improved on the combat very slightly so you can execute more moves. But the fact is the combat is still fucking boring but now you do it a lot more. And the new moves are rather pointless as the same 3 hit combo can defeat most enemies. The enemies are quite uninteresting and most of them just look stupid. Whether it is the female porn star ninjas, stupid dog things, or daft looking Golems. The platforming sections are still quite fun and defiantly the best part of the game, but because of the more combat orientated approach you end up fighting a lot during them. Which is slightly annoying as you can spend 5 minutes climbing, jump and swining, then fighting a crap load of enemies, dying, then having to start the entire process again. One little feature added is that you travel between the past and present of the castle. In the present it is ruined and falling apart, in the past it is new and shiny. The platforming sections save the game a little as they are still loads of fun and there is no other game series that does platforming quite like this.

The graphics in WW are improved slightly over SoT, textures are smoother, animation of the Prince is improved and when the game looks good it looks very good. However, facial animation looks worse than it did in SoT. And most of the game is black, grey or brown. This colour pattern makes the games locations look very dreary and uninteresting. Unlike the awe-inspiring locales of the first game. Plus when playing through the game some rooms you enter up to 5 times. I got sick of seeing the same fucking room even when travelling between past and present. It’s still the same damn room just in the present it’s got a big fucking hole in the floor and it’s grey instead of brown!

The music in SoT suited the Arabian/Indian setting, now in WW we’ve got a shite heavy metal soundtrack that starts at the stupidest moments and just keeps going and going and going. Why the hell are there electric guitars playing in ancient Arabia? And why are they playing when I’m walking down a corridor with nothing in it? I like heavy metal music (I’m listening to Iron Savior as I type this) but it just doesn’t suit the game at all.

The story is annoying, full of plotholes and annoying voice acting. I would go into it in detail but you can look it up anywhere and I wanna focus on the plotholes. How can the Prince control time if he hasn’t got the dagger from the first game? TRE on the forums said that it was because he had Farrah’s (the love interest from SoT) medallion. But he never got anything from Farrah at the end of the last game (save a shag) and he just buggered off. The plot hinges on the fact that the Dahaka, a guardian of the timeline, is chasing the Prince, because he opened the sands in the first game and was supposed to die. But he changed the timeline so he didn’t open the sands. The opening sequence of the game says that it doesn’t matter, he just has to die. What the hell? Did Ubisoft fire the writers of the first game? Couldn’t you come up with a half-decent explanation than “you HAVE to die”? Also, the Dahaka looks a lot like the Balrog from LOTR, except smaller, no fire and very black.

However, like I said when WW does what SoT did it’s fun and quite challenging, there is a good game in here, it’s just covered in all this crap it makes it barely playable.

So Ubisoft, if you make a third Prince of Persia game, make it more like Sands of Time and less like Warrior Within, you gits.