Prince of Persia is a sequel of sorts to the original 8 bit platformer back a long, long time ago in arcades. This new edition has some sweet graphics (it was built using Splinter Cell's engine) and some interesting ideas, but overall winds up playing a bit flawed.
First, the graphics and sound. Both of these can be considered highlights for the game. The graphics are excellent, the framerate generally smooth and the animations fluid. I actually saw no glitches at all in the game.
The sound is equally wonderful, with amazing voice acting and some nice environmental sounds, as well as thrilling music.
The story is somewhat more lackluster, as it is ill-defined and you're never quite sure what is going on. However, the means of telling it are quite good, and are integrated well into the gameplay. The prince narrates the entire story in retrospect, and save points, health bar and Dagger upgrades all fit in nicely with the world.
Speaking of the dagger, it's probably the game's biggest innovation. This handy glowing blue weapon has the power to rewind time, thus saving you from dying from not jumping quite far enough. This allows you greater freedom to experiment with how to solve a particular puzzle or problem.
Another great gameplay feature is one that's so painfully obvious yet so well-executed it's a wonder no one has tried it before. All those who are tired of poor camera angles, raise your hand. Good, now put it down and keep it there. The game lets you use the R2 and L2 buttons to get two different "views" accessible in any area. There is first-person view, and "landscape" view, which operates similar to fixed viewpoint games like Onimusha. I can't tell you how many times this has saved my life in this game.
Unfortunately, there are also some things to gripe about. For one, the learning curve is very strange: the first hour or two is extremely easy, and then there is a subsequent leap in difficulty that is hard to account for. Furthermore, the puzzles can be extremely tedious and time consuming, and since the directions are only spoken once, and never recorded anywhere, it can be tough to understand just what you're doing and why.
The last qualm is the most major one, being the combat system. At first it seems like there is quite a lot of variety, but you'll quickly learn that only two moves are really useful: one where you leap onto an enemy, flip over them and literally stab them in the back, and a harder-to-execute one where you flip off a wall to land behind an enemy. Later in the game all the enemies you encounter will indignantly throw you down when you attempt to leap onto them, causing you to lose lots of health. This makes the wall jump the only way to effectively fight, and as I've said, it's difficult to accomplish unless you have a knack for it.
In a game as well polished as this, having such a deficient combat system is a major disappointment, two-fifths of the game being combat. And it's ultimately that which forces me to give this game an 8.
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