Format: Xbox 360/PS3
Reviewer: Alex

It’s a beautiful, sweeping, epic (which won my best visual style of the year award), and it’s built on the solid movement engine from Assassin’s Creed; a game of proven quality, but is Prince of Persia actually any good?

No.

PoP holds you by the hand and guides you through the breathtaking levels, leaping from platform to platform with apparent grace and precision, until, that is, you spy through the silken veils and find that this potentate is bare-ass naked. Your hand isn’t just guided, it’s downright forced! When you realise this, you’ll see that you must simply press A, then B, then A, A, B, B, A until you reach the safe platform and reset your restart point. Just input the code with the right timing. One wrong button or a double-tap and you start again, swiftly, admittedly. It doesn’t seem like you died; Elika saved you. But she didn’t and you did. Now input the code again and get it right this time please. The result, rather dishearteningly, is a protracted, ten hour quicktime event.

Combat is much the same. A carefully predetemined line of binary (or whatever the four button version of binary is). And yes you do die, you just don’t get the animation. This seems dishonest of Ubisoft. For years they’ve been slapping us on the wrist for bailing on Sam Fisher or indeed the Prince himself and the games were frustrating, but you knew why and what the boundaries were. You also were able to vary your movements and timing a little. Expanding the prince’s world to a sandbox and then drawing a channel in the sand and nudging us back in whenever we attempt to veer off is not doing justice to the scope at stake here. This is a beautiful world, a textured, watercolour oasis. Key elements may be pilfered from Okami and team Ico’s efforts, but it is nonetheless a stunning achievement, graphically, aurally and for the smooth effortless movement. But effortless in this case may not be a compliment. If the game requires little of the player than to just be there, tapping buttons rhythmically on cue, surely some sort of guitar controller should have been supplied.

Rating: 6/10