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Review: Prince of Persia - The Two Thrones

Posted by Zonk on Mon Dec 19, 2005 02:55 PM
from the now-with-goatee-sporting-evil-prince dept.
Entertainment Games
Two years ago the pixelated graphics and long-ago memories of the Prince of Persia gave way to the slick and entertaining Sands of Time. The reinvisioning of the venerable Prince caught everyone by surprise and kick-started a trilogy of excellent puzzle titles, with intuitive combat mechanics thrown in for good measure. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones is the final chapter of the three part story. The Prince is older, grittier, and has a definite mean streak. He also has a length of spiked chain fused with his arm, but that's just part of the fun. Read on for my impressions of the final chapter in the story of the Prince.
  • Title: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
  • Developer/Publisher: Ubisoft
  • System:Xbox (PC,PS2,GC)
  • Score:7/10

The Prince has had a hard couple of years. Do one stupid thing like release the mythical sands of time and destroy your father's kingdom, and you end up on the run and gritty, fighting off the forces of time and a Sand Wraith with personal vengeance issues. At the start of Two Thrones, though, the Prince is finally returning home with a boat and a girl. What could be better? Unfortunately, the Prince is like C3PO. It's his lot in life to suffer. He catches sight of his city for the first time in years, only to realize that it's burning. His ship is destroyed, and his woman picked up by the enemy forces sacking the city.

Luckily, the Prince is a resourceful guy. As in previous titles, the focus of Two Thrones' gameplay is on maneuvering the Prince through what is effectively a three dimensional maze. Wall walking, ledge climbing, and impressive leaps all make a comeback from Sands of Time and Warrior Within. There are a few additional moves added into the mix to accommodate new story and combat elements. There is one new platforming element: Shutters. These spring-loaded boards are usually located on walls, and once you reach them by wall walking will rocket you across a room into an unsuspecting enemy. These shutters can often be used to start a Speedkill, the biggest change in the combat system from previous games. If you can approach or leap onto a baddie that is unaware of your presence, you slip into a slow-mo mode that requires you to hit the attack button at precise intervals. Doing so allows the Prince to brutally dispatch a foe with minimal effort and almost no sound. This added stealth element is a welcome change, allowing you the opportunity to quickly take out a room full of baddies and get back to the puzzle part of the game with minimal fuss. If you don't enjoy the normal combat, Speedkilling is the easiest way to get through the game without engaging in a lot of fisticuffs. Frustratingly, it's never entirely obvious when a baddie will notice you or not. If you remain hidden as you approach a baddie you are bathed in a golden glow, but even when approaching from behind it's possible for a guard to break your glow and drop you into normal combat mode.

Normal combat will be very familiar to players of Sands of Time or Warrior Within. The game still has one of the best multi-enemy juggling systems of any console title. It's effortlessly easy to flip and jump between multiple enemies, slicing and dicing until there's no one left alive. While you have your own blade, as in Warrior Within you can steal weapons from opponents both during and after combat. The capability to use multiple weapons ensures that besides the invigorating combat you'll have some options as far as the chopping goes. Combat as the Prince can sometimes be a white-knuckle affair, because for all his dexterity the Prince isn't a front line fighter. Luckily, or unluckily depending on how you look at it, the Prince has a darker half that excels at combat.

The Dark Prince is the result of the fusing of the Prince to the Sand Wraith, and if you thought the Prince had baditude problems in the second game ... you'd be right. But he's a jerk here too, as the Sand Wraith's dark energies force him to do terrible things. Dark Prince is a much more effective combatant, a length of chain (called the Daggertail) extending from his arm proving to be perfect for fending off large groups of foes. Gameplay as the Dark Prince is subtlety different. Every moment he's not in combat drains him of health, as the sands slowly kill his mortal frame. Puzzle completion, then, becomes a mad rush to reach the next fight sequence as almost every foe defeated refills the Dark Prince's health bar. There are a few different puzzle elements, too, as Bionic Commando-style the Dark Prince can swing over obstacles. This new split personality is intriguing both from a gameplay and storytelling standpoint, and re-interested me in the Prince as a character. The gritty Prince from the Warrior Within was such a tool that I found myself losing interest in what happened to him by the end of the game. Here, seeing the slightly edgier but mostly nice-guy Prince from Sands of Time battling it out in his head with the Sand Wraith, I could do nothing but empathize with him.

The game looks as good as ever, the soft visuals and sweeping architecture of the first two games returning with impressive results. Though by today's next-gen standards it may not be cutting edge, the care which the designers put into the look of the game made what power the game's engine does have come to life. Characters are well-textured, but the sometimes blocky animation has thrown me off since the first Prince title. From a sound perspective, I was much happier with Two Thrones than the previous game. Annoying rock music has given way to Mideastern-flavoured music, like that heard in Sands of Time. Voice acting was competently done, and I continued to enjoy the quiet asides the Prince has with himself as he travels through the game. The acting is probably at its best when the Light Prince and Dark Prince are arguing, resulting in a sometimes-hilarious schizoid diatribe.

I'll be upfront: I found the decisions made for Warrior Within to be almost Poochie-level bad. The 'gritty' Prince with the goatee and callous demeanor may have made him more hard-core, but totally turned me off to him as a character. One of the most satisfying aspects of Sands of Time was the way players could empathize with the regular old middle eastern ninja who had gotten himself stuck in a bad situation. The return of the Light Prince in Two Thrones was a happy decision, and the Sand Wraith's level of participation in the story was exactly what I was looking for. The wrestling with the self that the Prince goes through was an interesting story. Interesting enough, in fact, to push me through combat that I've been playing for almost two years now, and puzzle elements that I've long since become competent in. Two Thrones is a familiar game with some new paint, and in this case I'm okay with that. Fans of the series will be pleased with the way the story ends, and newcomers to the gameplay will find the puzzling and fighting just as enjoyable in this title as in previous iterations of the game. Prince of Persia: Two Thrones is a strong finish for an excellent series built on entertaining gameplay and powerful storytelling.

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  • Spiked chain? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ykant (318168) on Monday December 19 2005, @02:58PM (#14293442)
    Remember when this series was a great puzzle-platformer, with occasional combat? Now it's God of War???

    • Re:Spiked chain? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Breaker_1 (688170) * on Monday December 19 2005, @03:00PM (#14293474) Homepage
      It's still a great puzzle platformer. I've been playing it since the day it came out. The puzzle isn't so much look around the room and figure out where to go, slowly making progress. The challenge now is to figure out where you're going to go, fast, and get it right on the first try. The combat system has changed a lot from the Sands of Time and even Warrior Within. It requires much more stragety.
    • I remember that Price of Persia was a great puzzle-platformer. I also remember rapidly losing interest in Prince of Persia 2 because you spend the first half hour on stupid sword fights (which are not the engine's strong suit) and Mario-style jumping segments (no cool swithes, levers, or deadly floor tiles). The game then went to 3D and lost any semblence of puzzle-platformer. The "series" you are thinking of is only one game long.
    • I recently installed and started playing Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time. In the middle of playing, my CD-Drive suddenly started making STRANGE noises. Since that moment, my CD-Drive no longer works -- the actual hardware seems to somehow got damaged. This struck me as quite strange, because I was playing this on a laptop which was just 4 days old! I sent in the CD-Drive for replacement, when I happened to chance on a story at Digg about a copy protection method named "StarForce" [similarities.org], which has the pote
        • If you checked the page that I linked to, you will find a list of titles which use StarForce -- and Sands of Time is on that list. I myself am very sceptical about this, but what conclusion would YOU draw, when the brand new machine that you've had for 4 days, suddenly has a CD-Drive failure, that my CD-burning software is no longer working, and that I'm waiting for a replacement CD-Drive. FYI: I'm a developer in the PC scene since over 15 years, and not a n00b jumping to conclusions.
          • ...what conclusion would YOU draw, when the brand new machine that you've had for 4 days, suddenly has a CD-Drive failure, that my CD-burning software is no longer working, and that I'm waiting for a replacement CD-Drive.

            My conclusion? After only four days, my first guess would be that it's just a shit drive, and that you got burned by the bathtub curve and poor quality control. If you'd been running it for a year, I'd be a bit more suspicious, but brand-new components can and do fail all by themselves

      • Nice, but the finest example of that particular crap is Diablo which is PC only :-)
        • Actually, there was a quite good port of it to the old Playstation. It was 2-player co-op on the same screen, which was quite fun on the console.

          And Diablo was just NetHack with better graphics.

  • If only... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hal2814 (725639) on Monday December 19 2005, @03:00PM (#14293462)
    "Two years ago the pixelated graphics and long-ago memories of the Prince of Persia gave way to the slick and entertaining Sands of Time."

    No, back in 1999 the pixelated graphics and long-ago memories of the Prince of Persia gave way to the absolutely dreadful Prince of Persia 3-D. A game so bad I wouldn't play Sands of Time until it was two old because I refused to believe that anything Prince of Persia related could be good after the 3D piece of crap that was Prince of Persia 3D.

  • Pixelated? (Score:4, Informative)

    by FatSean (18753) on Monday December 19 2005, @03:01PM (#14293482) Homepage Journal
    If I recall correctly, the original Prince of Persia looked quite smoothly animated and drawn.

  • The original PoP was one of my favorites games for my SNES. I really have to give these new PoP titles a try...

  • Should I bother with "Warrior Within"? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chmarr (18662) on Monday December 19 2005, @03:03PM (#14293497)
    I played "Sands of Time" and thoroughly enjoyed it. I've not bought nor played "Warrior Within". Since the reviewer didn't seem to like Warrior Within, should I even bother with it, or go straight to "The Two Thrones" ?

    • Re:Should I bother with "Warrior Within"? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Breaker_1 (688170) * on Monday December 19 2005, @03:17PM (#14293615) Homepage
      It all depends on what you want. The game itself is darker, and in some senses cheesier than The Sands of Time, however it is much harder. It'll also be part of the story. Think of the last three Prince of Persia games like the Indiana Jones series. The first one was good, the second one was okay and, almost too dark for it's own good, and the last one was good. So, if you want to play a game similar to The Sands of Time, no don't bother with Warrior Within. If you want a challening game, and to know more of the story, yes .. play it.

    • Re:Should I bother with "Warrior Within"? (Score:5, Informative)

      by minginqunt (225413) on Monday December 19 2005, @03:25PM (#14293675) Homepage Journal
      It's important, when considering the now roundly rogered-into-a-happy ending trilogy, to realise that whilst Warrior Within was a disappointment for many ICO and Sands of Time fans, there was much that the game got right. It would be churlish to pretend otherwise given that even EG gave it a 7/10. 7/10 is a respectable score for a game. The game disappointed primarily because of what *might have been*, rather than what was.

      Indeed, the free-form fighting system was a necessary if not sufficient addition. The Dohaka chases were fantastic. The game was longer, more exciting than SoT and had an engagingly mental Sci-fi plotline.

      But when all is said and done, this was not the sequel that Sands lovers (like myself) wanted. It entertained me, and indeed I completed it (both endings) with a wilfull glee. But in many respects it was a parallel universe to Sands of Time. Same gorgeousness, same ridiculously fluid controls, same environmentally-minded puzzles, just no... soul.

      One of the best aspects of The Two Thrones, and I'm saying this having sat up until 7am this morning, dishing out Speed Kill death to that cock of a Vizier, is that in tying up the storyline of the Prince, it even manages to convincingly contextualise the misstep in style that was Warrior Within.

      One can view the entire Sands of Time trilogy now as a coming-of-age story, redemption through acceptance and eventually growing up. Warrior Within represents the Prince's angst-riddent adolescence, full of misdirected rage and charmless anger. If Sands of Time was a story of the innocence of youth, The Two Thrones is a story of reconciliation, of a man growing up, accepting responsibility for his mistakes and becoming whole again.

      As a Prince game, if Sands was a 9/10, and Warrior a 7/10, then Thrones is a solid 8. It falls short of the majesty of Sands in a few key areas:

      * Pointless Chariot Races
      * Overly hard bosses (Ring of fire... Gah!) This is not what PoP is supposed to be about.
      * Not quite as magical as sands of time, at least until the moment at which the Vizier captures Farah. After that... wow.
      * Overuse of the wall-springs and the dagger-hold devices.
      * Game takes a while to find its stride.

      The game is buoyed up by its wonderful Speed Kill dynamic, the awesome final 25%, its return to form, and the brilliantly brief Dark Prince segments.

      8/10 is the consensus opinion. Thus it is unanswerable truth.

      In allowing the unification of the odd style of Warrior Within (a game I still enjoyed a great deal, despite its stylistic missteps) with the wonderful magic aura of Sands of Time, and allowing a story of redemption to come to fruition that neatly ties together the stories of the Prince, Farah, Kaileena and the sands, The Two Thrones is a fine ending to an excellent, if problematic trilogy. Fans of third-person action-adventures, and fans of either of the first two games will have an engaging time. I did.
    • I've been forcing myself to play "Warrior Within" off and on for about two months now. It just doesn't hold my interests. The game is, frankly, kinda boring. The music is absolutely terrible (especially when compared to the first game); consisting mostly of poor ambient tunes with the occasional eastern flair, backed by really bad Godsmack metal tracks. The dialog is almost always terrible, with only a few better parts by the two main characters. The game is crippled by all sorts of glitches and audio
    • I started on the PoP games on WW. The PoP I knew of at the time was the old "pixelated" game, and I hadn't even realized there was a remake. But a friend had it and I decided to give it a try. (She never did manage to finish WW.) So to me without any prior PoP experience, it was a great game.

      I later went back and played Sands of Time, and to me it was an odd game at first, but I grew to like it. I found some of the mechanics a bit frustrating after having gotten used to WW. But in the end I enjoyed Sa

    • Re:Should I bother with "Warrior Within"? (Score:5, Funny)

      by stx23 (14942) on Monday December 19 2005, @03:45PM (#14293830) Homepage Journal
      Instead of playing Warrior Within, listen to Godsmack at full volume and scream "Bitch!" at the top of your lungs for a few minutes. It's much the same experience.

      It's a bad, bad game.
    • One option you may entertain, if you have a PSP, is the 'Prince of Persia Revelations' title. It seems that they went back and tried to "fix" parts of Warrior Within, while expanding the levels for the PSP version. I have no idea how successful they were but it might be worth a try.

  • Same old? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chaffar (670874) on Monday December 19 2005, @03:03PM (#14293498)
    There are a few additional moves added into the mix

    I stopped playing the latest PoP's when I realized that I was killing the monsters using the same goddamn animation over and over and over again. And it's not like the game would send 2 or 3 identical beasties at you, you'd get TWENTY of 'em, and all would have to die using the "I'll jump over you and stab you at the exact same place". And I wouldn't do it 'cause it was the easiest way to kill'em, it would be the ONLY way to kill'em. Bad design, IMHO...

    • There are some pleasure derived/activated from doing repetitive movement.

      If you see a lion move around in the zoo in a repetitive way, this is why.

      If this is a way to sell games according to some companies, they should go bankrupt.

    • Re:Same old? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Gulthek (12570) on Monday December 19 2005, @03:19PM (#14293624) Homepage Journal
      Wow. We certainly played entirely different games. Too bad for you. :-D

      I liked the wushu-ish "stand on one hand while twirling the sword with the other, while kicking two other enemies at the same time" move. But the double-blade decapitation (usually deliciously done in slow-mo) was a close second.

      How about the vertical wall run (with two swords) where the prince flips off and twirls back down as a metallic vortex of death and dismemberment?

      Or the weapon steal where you kill the enemy with their *own weapon*? (bonus if its an axe and you use it to cut them in half at the waist)
      • Standing whirl attack was the best...

        Nothing can touch you... unless it fell on your head.
      • We certainly played entirely different games.

        No, you played the same games.. you just somehow responded to some other post than the OP.

        The OP stated that the 'killing motions' were repetitive. Having played the first game in the series, I wholeheartedly agree. Yes, they're cool, but after the 500th time.. it's just not the same. And the slo-mo was so annoying to me. I just wanted to kill the fuckers and get back to the puzzles.
        • Well, the combat in SoT really was very repetitive, but there wasn't that much of it, so it didn't really annoy me. They improved it in WW though, with the two-weapon fighting system, and a bunch of new moves. If you (generic you) still saw the same move over and over again in WW, it was your own damn fault. In TT, if you use speed kill often, you really see the same animations over and over again.
  • I loved Sand of Times and the original 2D scroller games. However, the Warrior Within demo did not impress me. I do need a sample of The Two Thrones to see if I will like it or not.

  • Penny-Arcade Prince Of Persia Comics are up (Score:5, Informative)

    by JLavezzo (161308) on Monday December 19 2005, @03:07PM (#14293527) Homepage
    8 Pages of comics, up at:
    http://www.princeofpersiagame.com/us/community/ind ex.php [princeofpersiagame.com]

  • Am I the only one? (Score:5, Funny)

    by farrellj (563) on Monday December 19 2005, @03:11PM (#14293565) Homepage Journal
    Does anyone else think that Prince of Persia is just an update of Lode Runner?

    ttyl
              Farrell

  • Just Finished (Score:5, Informative)

    by Edward Kmett (123105) on Monday December 19 2005, @03:27PM (#14293695) Homepage
    Having just spent the weekend before my finals on this game, my only issue with this review is that I think it gave it too low of a score. =) I went back and played Warrior Within to get back up to snuff, suffering through the overly looped music to do so, then dove into Two Thrones.

    The good:

    The music is back to the style of Sands of Time.

    They brought back the Sands of Time voice actor.

    Some additional platformer elements.

    The dark prince is more enjoyable than the sand wraith was to play. The dark prince plays like a strange mixture of "Bionic Commando" and Kratos from God of War. Since picking up sand regenerates him to full, he gets to deal with swarms of enemies, and is fairly liberating to play.

    The quick kill system helps remove a lot of the tedium of the encounters. Since you can avoid a lot of the "tons of enemies" fights by stealthily killing the guards before they can sound the alarm. I found myself trying to be sneaky, which was a novel experience for me in a PoP title.

    I think they did a fairly good job of reconciling the two seemingly different characters of the prince from Sands of Time and the more callous, hardened version of him that came along later in Warrior Within.

    The bad:

    The last chariot race was annoying, well, until I went back to the part before hand and made sure to do it with extra sand.

    It was too short. The one thing I did like about Warrior Within was that its environments were mostly bidirectional; you wound up going forward and back through the same general area in two different times. In Two Thrones they returned to the Sands of Time linear story line. I think they lost a bit of the free-form feeling that you had in Warrior Within.

    There doesn't appear to be an alternate ending ala the last two titles.

    Conclusion:

    All in all I enjoyed the title. Now I need to go cram for finals.

  • Does it have Farah the hot girl from 'Sands of Time'?
    when gamers would "stare" at her up close in her little skimpy red skirt and top for a prolonged period of time, her programming would take notice and she would spout out some witty remark, likely shocking lonely nerds into a defensive(alt+F4) reaction, thinking they were busted, painfully their zipper catches on.............
    well you get the point.
  • I played the original PoP (back in, what, the early 90s?) on my old AMD 486 dx40 (shit, was that my processor?). Anyhow, it was a 2d, arcade-style jump and hook game that would suck you in so hard you could never escape. Obstacle after obstacle, challenge after challenge I over-came with exact jump and hook sequences. Me and a friend teamed up trying to conquer it. Yes, fun, but dammit to hell, frustrating as all get out. We finally got to some place that was undoable and were pro-gamers (I only admit
      • I did say that didn't I? Let me define: played a lot of games, but apparently not well.... "Pro" as in "knowledgeable" ... not necessarily talented.... I'm over-explaining now aren't I?

        I simply only ever remembering never finishing two games: GnG and PoP. Oh, and everquest, never fucking finished everquest....
  • I played all 3 Ubisofts PoP games. To be quite frank I liked Warrior Within, it drastically changed the atmosphere and allowed you to perform better movements and pick up weapons on-the-fly, it gave you (and the game) an edge that you didn't have before.

    I guess to start off with the first one, I found Sands of Time the coolest at the beginning, since you could actually fight other soldiers instead of transformed creatures. The puzzles were awesome and it really kept me going through the end, - that one a
      • I'd have to disagree. Playing as Dark Prince was really challenging, frustrating at times, but in a good way. It really lent a sense of urgency to a game that generally gives you a lot of time to figure things out and I found the change of pace quite nice. "Something to kill! I need something to kill!" It's not like any of his sections are impossible, just difficult. Also, since every pot you smashed or every enemy you killed would return you to full health, it wasn't all that bad.

        I also thought that they h

    • There's no control over viewing angles. This is a console thing, as consoles until the 360 haven't had enough power to allow freedom of view.

      WTF? Console games have had movable cameras since the days of the PSX. Limiting the camera angles is a design choice; the system's power has nothing to do with it.

      Typically it's done because the programmers can't get a player-controlled camera working correctly and conveniently, or because allowing a wider range of viewing angles would require more artwork, or becaus

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