Prince Of Persia: The Forgotten Sands Preview

29 Apr 2010 at 13:52:34 by Tim McDonald

From Sands of Time onwards, the Prince of Persia series has always been composed of discrete parts. No matter whether you're playing Warrior Within, or the more recent cartoon-styled entry into the series, you'll do some acrobatics, and then you'll have a fight. Repeat.

Each game since Sands of Time has attempted to redress this balance in different ways. Sands of Time had – and it pains me to write this about a game I love so much – combat that was passable at best, but made up for it with flowing acrobatics and thoroughly charming characters. Warrior Within went the opposite direction, fixing up the combat but removing a lot of what made Sands of Time brilliant. The rest, too, tried to sort these issues in their own way.

And so we come to Forgotten Sands, and a welcome return to the Sands/Warrior/Two Thrones era Prince. Here, he's off to visit the besieged fortress of his brother Malik, and with the battle looking lost, Malik unleashes the mystical Sand Army in order to defeat his foes. As you'd expect, anything involving the words “unleashing” and “sand” in this series results in all of the castle occupants barring Malik and the Prince being turned into sand, and the awakening of an ancient evil. As usual, it's up to the Prince to dodge, dip, duck, dive, and wallrun in order to get around the fortress, slay sand soldiers, and finally defeat said ancient evil.

In this respect, it's not particularly different to the rest of the Sands series. Malik's fortress is filled with increasingly improbable traps (which, I must admit, do add a little je ne sais quoi to the décor) that have to be avoided, and the Prince still has access to a variety of powers to help him stay alive. The most prominent is obviously the returning time reversal ability, but it's the others that made us sit up and pay attention.

The first you'll get access to is the ability to freeze water. While you'd think this would be tremendously unhelpful in a series predominantly set in desert locations, a handy supply of waterfalls and burst pipes means that you can create your own paths. If a gap's too far to jump, then freeze the water gushing out in front of it, leap to the new pole of ice, and then swing off it. Technically, this doesn't change things up too much – you're still grabbing onto and swinging from poles, only they're made of ice rather than stone – but novel level design saves the day, somewhat, particularly with bursts of water that alternate, or waterfalls that must be passed through. In one or two sections of the preview code, I found myself narrating my progress: “Run, jump, grab, swing, swing, jump, freeze, swing, unfreeze quickly before you faceplant the waterfall, okay now freeze and grab onto the ice, jump, shimmy, shimmy, wallrun, unfreeze...” (Yes, I am a remarkably silly man.)

Pulling off a section like this feels marvellous: by the time sections this difficult crop up the controls are natural, and there's a genuine feeling of euphoria at accomplishing something that's both so impressive-looking and so enjoyably tense, particularly with the split-second timing and sheer concentration required to freeze and unfreeze without either faceplanting a wall or sailing through a stream of water. My only problem is that the traps don't appear to be water-powered, so freezing does nothing against them, which was pretty much my explanation for how everything worked in the last few games. Here's hoping for a level in the fortress' engineering section which explains how the hell all of the trap technology works, because otherwise I give up on trying to work it out.

The other ability we got to play with was an air dash manoeuvre, which has the Prince, um, dash at an enemy when he's in flight. This is used primarily for platforming rather than combat; while it does plenty of damage, it's not something that can be activated willy-nilly and is instead used for traversing huge gaps that you can't make through other means.

No, the acrobatics and platforming appear utterly lovely based on what we've seen, and if the level design and other powers remains consistent as the game goes on, all will be well. If anything, it's the combat I'm slightly worried about. It appears to have taken a bit of a backstep from Warrior Within and Two Thrones, with huge combos and movelists having gone out the window. There are still tricks you can pull off, like leaping onto an enemy and ramming your sword through the back of his head, and your chances of survival are raised through the use of magic powers (like the as-awesome-as-it-sounds Whirlwind), but other than that it feels a bit basic. The numbers are new, admittedly; while I didn't deliberately count I'm fairly confident that most battles have at least twenty assailants, giving things a bit of a Dynasty Warriors feel, and to that end, the Prince's attacks are more sweeping than usual so that he can hit multiple foes at once.

Right now, then, the combat feels acceptable but little more. We're hoping that some more diverse enemy types and the rest of the powers will improve matters as the full version goes on, as it's certainly true that we were playing an early section, and there's an entire upgrade tree we unfortunately had no access to.

How much the combat matters depends on what you're after as a player, I suspect. For me at least, the Prince of Persia series has always been about the flow of the movement rather than the diversionary combat, and so the occasional inconvenience of a scrap didn't bother me when there was so much excellent platforming to indulge in. It's true that for The Forgotten Sands to be the definitive Prince game the combat needs to be tightened up, but from what we've played we've got high hopes nonetheless.

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