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Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Published: Tue 20 Nov, 2007 | On:

I borrowed Warrior Within from a friend, and have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. I guess Id better start from the start. For someone like me who has never played a POP game, the learning curve was quite steep. The tutorials were not very helpful in game, and the first boss battle you come to in the first 5 or so mins was quite hard for someone who had just started the game. I fought bravely and inevitably died. I almost put down the controller at that point, after being sent to the last checkpoint each time, rather then the start of the boss battle again. This might have been a good thing, because it helped me learn the combat and to actually block for once, but I'm sure they should've been able to find a way around having to restart and also learn about combat with general enemies etc. The fun begins as you arrive on the island, and get to learn some cool moves. Wall runs and death defying leaps are half the fun of this game. Once you get into the fortress thing, you should be pretty good at killing people. Despite what the other review said, in my opinion the combat is much more then button mashing, and I don't see how someone could get through the game that way. Anyways, the levels can sometimes be confusing, especially when you just start and don't know what to look for. I also found myself having to look on the good old internetz to find out how to pass a few areas which had less then obvious solutions. The bad thing is that there is quite a lot of backtracking involved which forms a larger then wise part of the game, but a little bit of it is kept fresh by going somewhere you've been in a completely different time. Im getting bored so now for the combat.

POP:WW has very well made combat, letting you choose the various ways you want to slice people up. If you can remember how the control work then you will soon be able to own up lots of badly voiced over generic henchmonsters. For example you can run up to a person and press Y to flip over them so you end up behind them. If you press Y again you can throw them in a direction controlled by the analog stick. Press B repeatedly and you strangumalatify them. IF you get bored of that press X to slice them down the middle. There are quite a few combos but some of the combos are just moves you already have done chained together with some more moves. You can use the environment in combat to some extent. You can launch off walls and execute moves from wall runs. My favourite move is to run up a wall and press Y while running to do this awesome spinny cutty thing. Unfortunatly you don't seem to be able to do moves involving 2 people. Sure, you can slice n dice 2 peeps at the same time, but you can't grab them both and bang their heads together movie style. The Prince also makes some good use of his sands of time, which allows you to slow down and reverse time if you cant handle the combat jandal. There is also a great power which lets you go super fast and wackify everyone, the only problem being single sword strikes dont do a whole lot of damage. These time powers also come in handy a lot with getting past the random traps and various dangerous sharp things throughout the castle.

The graphics are quite cool, with some great bloom effects and awesome art direction. Seriously, there is this great big garden on the side of the castle you have to go through, and its looks breathtaking. Then you look out to see and see boats at the docks, dwarfed by giant cliffs and towers. The character models don't quite stand up to the close up treatment given in cutscenes, and the game seemed to have a rock solid framerate on my end, so I dont see why the couldn't have added a few more polys or bumped up the texture res a bit but the environments more then make up for it. There are lots of minor details like moss, broken and loose bricks etc, that seem to bring the game to life a bit more.

Now for the sound. Tbh, the music is absolute crap, they should've made it more Arabiany. Not all the music was bad, but the stuff that was was the noticible stuff. The voice acting isn't amazing, but isnt too shabby either, but the game is kindof patronizing at some points. I am talking about when the Prince goes into extensive monologues and makes you feel like an idiot, as he explains everything that's happening. It's just like friggin yu gi oh and crap how they say everything they do.
Luckily this doesn't happen too often. The voice acting for the monsters is quite annoying, expecially the little grunt ones. There are also these super horny masochistic fighter skanks, which have a million dodgy lines that get quite annoying after you play the game for unnecessarily long periods.

The Good:
-Great fun doing lots of tricksy moves.
-Combat is fun.
-Environments are breathtaking!
-Exciting chase sequences which I forgot to mention.

The Bad: -
The lines and voice acting for the enemies. -
Backtracking. -
Annoying music. Learning curve, not helped by in game "tutorials" eg [tutorial] "press AXX to perform aerial slicinator" [/tutorial]

The slightly annoying but maybe fun in the end:
-This game has two endings, one of which I had to start from the start all over again so I did because Im obsessive compulsive I guess. The second playthrough was much more fun, though the alternate final boss battle was much too easy imo. That is about all the replay value there, but the game is still fun to play through if you haven't played it in a while.
-The cutscenes, but they sometimes were a lead up to something cool.


So yeah, thats it. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is a solid, though slightly difficult to learn game that is well worth you're time. Though I wouldn't buy it, its still an awesome game to play through like Destroy All Humans 2! but is nothing new is added each time. I hope you enjoyed my review, its my first anyway so dont be too hard on me.