Ubisoft's flagship sailed again late in 2008 with the release of a new take on the Prince of Persia franchise.  They called it, in an amazing display of focus group-inspired imagination, Prince of Persia, suggesting one almighty push of a reset button, cleansing from the memory all that had gone before it. 

So, with a new prince devoid of time-bending powers, a companion and a whole new storyline, have Ubisoft managed to breathe life into and heal the fertile grounds of their seminal series?  No no, you don't need to answer; I'm going to tell you.

Read on... 
 
You know when you're lost in a sandstorm, yeah, and your donkey's gone missing, then you just wander into someone else's business and, as a result of the attractiveness of a young lady, get dragged into an epic fight between good and evil?  Yeah?  Don't you just hate that?  I know I do, but still, makes for a good game, I find.  Prince of Persia is, presumably the first in a new series for the higher-end now-gen platforms (those being Xbox 360, PS3 and PC) and aims to take you far away from the PS2 outings of yesteryear, with their chronological tinkerings and desperately lonely and challenging environments.  But for those who enjoyed the previous Prince of Persia games, there certainly are some parallels: the prince is still ruggedly handsome and showing a nice amount of lumps'n'bumps in all the right places; there's still a hefty amount of swordplay; agility and acrobatics still form the backbone of the gameplay; the landscape has its own duality, but we'll get to all those in due course.

The biggest change to the feel of the game is your companion, Elika.  It could be said that, actually, the prince is Elika's companion, since she pushes the story forward every time and you - the prince - are there assist her in what is essentially her story.  The struggle between good and evil is a theme that heavily saturates the game with very literal light versus dark components.  Elika channels brilliant blue light at the dark creatures you battle, the so-called corruption that has spread throughout the lands is a murky, oily and tendrilous slick that clings to surfaces and pulls towards you as you move, as if you were a magnet to its sludgy iron filings.

Elika rarely leaves your side; only when she's being restrained will you get to go solo but that's because she's such an integral part of the gameplay.  She forces the corruption from the land by using one of her powers to heal what's called a fertile ground, to you or me, that just means 'place you need to get to on each level, where you'll have a boss battle'.  Upon healing the fertile ground, the dim grey gloom is pushes away, the oil slicks are removed and greenery springs forth, butterflies appear and the sun erupts from behind the receding cloud.  Little glowing stars appear throughout the now-healed level.  These are called light seeds and serve to extend the play of each level because without them, you simply can't complete the game: they feed Elika's powers.  There are plates of four different colours dotted throughout the levels, each different colour corresponds to different powers, allowing you to get to places you couldn't get to otherwise.  Collect more light seeds, unlock the ability to use these power-plates.

Elika doesn't let you die, either.  It's a nice mechanic that beautifully gets around that most awkward of gaming issues: the fact you die.  Generally, if we're going for realism, when we die, that's pretty much it.  You don't get the chance to continue, reload from a save point or respawn elsewhere on the map.  That's actually it.  You are dead.  Games, of course, generally ignore that point, but games like this actually work around it.  Elika stops you from falling, pulls you out of the corruption or temporarily incapacitates the creature that got the better of you.  Inconsistently, however, she can even do this while unconscious or restrained by tentacles of corruption.  That bothers me.  Quite a lot, actually, as it's not even addressed.  She'll be laying on the floor one minute, then she'll be pulling you up from your otherwise-inevitable doom, then she'll be laying on the floor again.  There's something deeply dissatisfying about that inconsistency.

Still, she packs a mean light-fuelled punch in combat and is part of the prince's own repertoire, they fight well together, stringing combos together that ultimately end in the death of the creature you're fighting.  Sometimes you use the environment to assist you, but most of the time, it's a matter of getting your enemy's health bar to zero.  Bosses tend to slink away until you have healed all the fertile grounds in their 'spoke' (it's a hub and spoke-format game and the map rather beautifully loads as you go; you could walk everywhere in this immense game without once seeing a loading screen, or you can teleport, which of course does require a bit of loading) where they will battle you for one last time before Elika heals them of their corruption.

The other huge difference between this and its predecessors is the art style.  It's one of very few now-gen games that doesn't try too hard to be realistic and so causes everything to look as though it's made of acrylic.  It uses a lovely cell-shading cartoony rendering, which probably goes some way to conceal some graphical blemishes, but also just sets it apart from pretty much all the other games on the shelves.  Everything has a watercolour feel to it, but it doesn't detract from the realism of it all.  It's very effective and adds a touch of edginess that, after so many games, the franchise really needs.

There's a bit of a love interest between the prince and Elika, as well as a lot of tongue-in-cheek machismo camaraderie between the pair and they actually sell it really well; I'm the first to wince at cheesy one-liners, but this is pleasing because the prince will say, upon beating a creature "in your face, ugly mofo, I beat you and I beat you good" or something along those lines and Elika will reply, "don't be such a twat."  Again, that's an interpretation, but that's pretty much how it goes.

Agility and acrobatics, as I said, are very much the vertebrae of the game and the prince can pull off some rather nifty moves, as you'd expect.  The game is, in essence, a thoroughly enjoyable wall-running, ceiling-skimming, mega-jumping (with the assistance of Elika), pole-swinging, beam-walking, column-gripping, slide ...erm, -sliding, ledge-clinging, vine-hanging blur and Elika keeps up with you pretty well, though she does slow you down when you're climbing on plants because you have to carry her on your back.  Because the controls are so very easy to use, stringing these moves together in the way the level designer intended is a real joy; it's not really a case of having to be particularly adept with your controller, more of knowing which key to hit and when and being quick-witted enough to identify what you have to do next.  Building up a flow is just such a satisfying experience but I did notice that often, in particularly long runs of moves, you don't actually need to touch the analogue sticks at all.  You can just be hitting the jump, swing and Elika-assist buttons and, for the most part, that's all you need to do.  Sometimes though, you'll fuck up because you needed to hold up and jump to climb the wall and will just hit jump which, annoying, will cause the prince to jump away from the wall, Elika will pull you up again and you'll start from the last piece of firm ground on which you stood.

Another slight niggle with the controls is that sometimes you'll want to wall-run horizontally, but he'll do it vertically, and vice versa, so sometimes they can be a little ambiguous, but it's nothing too drastic.  The camera also has its issues, but once you've decided which axes you want inverting - or not - you just get on with it, but it can be a little frustrating when you're mid-flow and you have to be moving the camera as well as hitting your buttons, but life's a challenge, isn't it.

All in all, the game is brilliant.  Perhaps a bit repetitive, but with the new power-plates coming into play as you go, it's not too bad.  The story is rather good and the characters are very entertaining, while the scenery is stunning in both its grim and healed forms.  Combat is a bit hit-and-miss because sometimes you just have to stand there blocking for ages before you can get a move in, but that's just something you get used to and work around so yes, the prince, though a different bloke, has perfectly executed a triumphant return, so I can happily adorn his palace with a rather splendid

92%

8-D

• Visually stunning and fairly unique
• Satisfying gameplay with flows of concatenated acrobatic moves
• Entertaining characters and story

>:-(

• Slightly repetitive at times
• Controls and camera can be a bit dodgy
• Elika's inconsistent states of consciousness