Prince of Persia
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ESRB:
Alcohol Reference,Language - Mild,Suggestive Themes,Violence
Publisher: UbiSoft Genre(s): Action / Adventure Home Page: http://www.princeofpersiagame.com/
Seamless World Power Plates open up otherwise inaccessible areas - this one allows you to perform otherwise impossible leap across. Part of the reason for the lack of challenge is the tradeoff that was made to provide a large and seamless game world with multiple routes. In Prince of Persia, there is just one massive map - you can actually run non-stop from the starting point at the Temple all the way to the end of the game - assuming you have unlocked everything. Progress is tiered only by the use of Power Plates. The Temple has four Power Plates that unlock their counterparts around the play area, and each plate requires a number of Seeds of Light to be collected. So it's a large seamless world, but initially large chunks of it is inaccessible because the plates are inactive. So in the end it's still about levels - the map is split into areas, each containing a fertile ground to be healed. You select your destination from the map and then Elika will point the way as needed to ensure you won't get lost at the points where the routes branch. Once you have healed a fertile ground, the immediate area is cured from corruption and the area is populated with Seeds of Light. This requires you to effectively re-play the area while hunting for Seeds, but interestingly the area can end up being different in subtle ways. As the sludge of corruption is removed, new routes and side-paths open up, enticing you to explore the immediate area for all the Seeds. You don't need every Seed in every level to advance and if needed, you can later return to hunt down any you missed, but you do need a bundle from the first four areas to unlock the first Power Plate which opens up additional areas. You repeat this until all four plates are unlocked and you can reach every area in the game.
The non-linear nature of the map brings the major tradeoff. There is no difficulty curve to speak of. Okay, the first four levels are ever so slightly easier than the rest, but as soon as you start unlocking plates, the rest of the game is effectively set at a static difficulty level. It's a big tradeoff just so you can say that the game is non-linear - especially as the areas themselves are very linear. There is often just one route from the start of the area to the fertile ground and while some side routes do open up once the area is cleansed, most of time time you are following a predetermined path as if playing on rails.
It doesn't really matter if you can turn a switch at the crossroads by choosing which area to tackle next or if some siderails open after you've cleansed an area, it's still on rails. I personally would've liked a more traditional Prince of Persia with slowly rising difficulty level and non-obvious paths that would take some effort to figure out. There is no need to figure out how to proceed and once you have unlocked your second plate, the shallow difficulty curve plateaus and the rest of the game is just a mop up to finish off the remaining areas. Stunning Visuals In many places the architecture of Prince of Persia is just incredible. The new visual style is striking and looks unique. As Prince of Persia is a multiplatform title, the minimum requirements fall in line with what you'd expect from a game that has to run on PS3 and Xbox 360. Like with Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft's engine scales surprisingly well, but this time only DX9 is used - not that it would've mattered much if token DX10 support was included. The graphics options of Prince of Persia are also not quite as extensive as with Altair's adventures, but the PC version does offer some controls to adjust the visuals. General detail level can be adjusted and there is the option to use high resolution textures to go beyond what the console versions offer. The practical minimum to play the game is similar to Assassin's Creed, a low end dual core and a Shader Model 3.0 card, while the recommended is slightly higher, mostly because Prince's acrobatics require smoother frame rate to keep the action fluid - you really want to keep the game at a constant framerate so the timing of your jumps won't get messed up. The engine supports multithreading but doesn't really ask that much from the CPU beyond the level of "bring a dual core". Your video card matters the most.
While Prince of Persia is not the most detailed or most shader heavy game ever, it looks incredible, especially in motion. Combat is close to watching an animated film. Part of it is due to heavy use of pre-defined fight sequences and quick time events, but that doesn't diminish the achievements of the animation team at Ubisoft one bit. These guys should start a school and teach all the two-bit developers that keep pushing out stiff and unconvincing character animation these days.
Related Stuff Games: Prince of Persia
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