Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
Imagine, if you will, heaven. A utopian paradise of verdant scenery in which everything is a delight to behold. Now imagine you are there, enjoying all it has to offer. However, the catering staff have called in sick, meaning that every few minutes you have to go and restock the nibbles. People get hungry in heaven, you see. To continue the analogy, imagine that there are plenty of nibbly things to choose from, and that the act of refilling the bowls is sufficiently entertaining that you could have fun just doing that all the time. But you can't. Your snack-based concerns, though pleasant enough, can't compete with heaven. And you have to keep refilling those damn bowls no matter what.
Alert readers may recall that I have something of a soft spot for Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, which I shall call SoT from here on in. A stunning game that takes the idea of the platformer, beats it into a fine liquid, and ferments it into the finest wine. With some unfortunately repetitive combat sequences. The design brief for Warrior Within (WW) seems to have been to "fix it," by which I mean "make it appeal to more people."
In doing so, Ubisoft have all but destroyed what it was that made SoT so good in the first place.
You may have noticed a somewhat negative tone to my mouth-words so far, but I urge you to remember the analogy I cobbled together in the first paragraph. WW is heaven, and for the most part so beautiful in spirit that the CDs actually repel evil and may have been responsible for curing the cold I caught before I started playing. The problem is that it does everything in its power to make you hate it.
First, let us tackle the thorny issue of combat. SoT locked you in until you had defeated the streams of enemies therein. You couldn't run, as they'd just teleport to your position. You couldn't escape, as the doors were sealed by their presence. You basically had to kill everything, by abusing the initially stunning vault-over-and-slice move until they all faded to dust. This was your penance, the price you had to pay in order to feast upon the next room of daring acrobatics.
Good news: There are loads more ways to kill things. Two extra buttons for combat means the move list spans many screens and allows you to direct the battles in any way you wish. So, you've vaulted over your enemy. You can now slice them in two as you did back in SoT, or you could spring off them and land on top of someone else, or roll backwards and fling them into a wall (or another opponent), or kick their legs away from under them, or steal their weapon and use it against them. You can grab hold of someone and use them as a makeshift shield, before strangling them or throwing them or... well, you get the picture. Dual weapon combat opens up another array of possibilites, from cyclone swipes to scissor attacks that deftly remove a head. The occasional slow-motion camera picks up particularly stunning moments of combat, and all in all, fighting is fun again.
Bad news: It happens all the time. Rather than SoT's twenty enemy melees followed by a few minutes of room navigation, you now run into small groups just about everywhere you tread. If your acrobatics lead to a reasonably flat platform, you can bet you're going to draw your sword when you get there. And although you can technically run away, the camera locks on your unwanted targets and wallruns and leaps often change to aim you straight back at them. You're still effectively locked into the combat, but with the constantly depressing air of being able to escape if only the controls would let you.
"But wait," I hear you cry, "surely you should judge this game, which is clearly combat-based, on its own merits rather than those of its predecessor." And I shall. Warrior Within fixes SoT's combat by adding plenty of variation, but then goes and breaks it again by putting it everywhere. The two ideas cancel each other out, meaning fighting is still ultimately tedious, only now broken up by even smaller acrobatic sections.
So, with the fighting out of the way (for at least another minute or two), let us consider the Princely aspect. The part that made SoT so great. You will be pleased to know that the gentle sounds of footfall on walls still plays a part in WW. Swinging from beams, rebounding off the scenery and landing precariously on a narrow beam is every bit as enjoyable as it should be. The ability to reverse time, as well as to slow it down to dodge traps, remains to help you through without smashing the monitor. The Prince is now under pursuit from the time-policing Dahaka, creating some excitingly tense chase sequences, the colour fading from the screen as he closes in on you.
Ironically, the Dahaka is also responsible for WW's second strike. The prince of yore, with his softly-spoken comments and air of optimism, was a pleasure to play. Even if he did have an odd penchant for ripping off his clothing. In contrast, the new artist formerly known as prince is an entirely different person. The events since SoT have left him arrogant and closed. Warrior Within is about trying to cheat fate and prevent the prince's death, but frankly it's difficult to want to.
Then there's the backtracking. You'll need to traverse most rooms at least once, and often you'll have to reverse your path after reaching your objective. The interplay between past and present creates two versions of the same world, in a cheap sort of Zelda style, adding to the number of times you'll play through a room while changing the scenery slightly.
Everything wants me to hate this game. The incessant repetition, the flow-interrupting combat, the loss of Old Prince and the unengaging plot. It screams "tragedy" and "uninstallation" at every turn. But I can't. Inbetween the refilling of the nibbles, when you're wallrunning over a circular sawblade and launching yourself over deadly pits in the gentle haze, you're truly in heaven.
