Prince of Persia Preview

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 9th June 2008
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Instead, this new lead character is a different type of hero – a roguish vagabond who lets money slip through his fingers and who drifts in an out of polite society. He has no claim to conventional honour; this is a man who lives by the speed of his wit, or that of his sword when his wit fails him.

Still, a vagabond of the Prince’s character isn’t the type to lead a quiet life and so the game kicks off when the redesigned anti-hero is accidentally embroiled in a battle of the gods and is forced for perhaps the first time in his life to set aside his own hedonism and fight for the sake of others.

Trapped in what the game's designers have described to us as a land of myth and legend, the Prince is in the middle of an epic battle between the primal god of light Ormazd and his brother the lord of Darkness, Ahriman.

From the very start things don’t look too good and the Prince himself watches as the Tree of Life, which held the bulk of Ahriman’s powers within, is destroyed. His forces are fully unleashed and Ahriman sets himself the task of utterly destroying the world, which he mainly does by unleashing an awful, quaggy corruption that befouls and perverts everything it touches.

Prince of Persia Preview The Sands of Time

It all seems rather bleak for the Prince then – that is until he gets help from Elika, descendant of a people committed only to stopping Ahriman, called the Ahuras. Elika is massively different to the Prince in every way and has lived her entire life in a land cut off from the outside world, but she proves to be just as driven and capable as the Prince – the pair soon team up to try and restore light to the world before the darkness can spread beyond their control.

New Gameplay

A new story is all well and good and from the sounds of it Ubisoft Montreal has done an excellent job of reinventing the origins and character of the Prince of Persia, but the key to any game's success is how well it plays. After all, there have been plenty of great games with no story to speak of, but hardly any great games with an amazing story but broken gameplay. Again though, Halo springs to mind – zing!

Ubisoft Montreal hasn’t just been twiddling its thumbs in this department either though and the gameplay of the new Prince of Persia has been revamped in a few ways too.

Prince of Persia Preview The Sands of Time

Admittedly though, the alterations to the core gameplay seem mostly to be on the minor side rather than the major and perhaps that’s for the best. The new Prince of Persia is still very much a third person action-platformer at heart and the game is still focused very much on getting the player to navigate through environmental puzzles using their acrobatic skills. The sense of speed and ascent is still turned up high enough to give sweaty feet to anyone suffering from vertigo.

The environments themselves have changed and the new Prince of Persia – which we’ve confirmed with Ubisoft doesn’t have any stupid subtitles planned for it just yet – has more of an open world feel to it.

Members of the development team were hesitant to speak to us about this, claiming it was easy for readers to misinterpret, but the basic outline were given made it seem as if there would usually be a choice of linear routes to specific objectives. The different routes would promise you a chance to match the difficulty to your skill and players can expect to see the option to travel in relative safety in Ormazd’s realm…or they can risk their necks in Ahriman’s domain.

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