Great start to a great video game trilogy.
Graphics in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time are actually pretty bad with simplistic character design especially. Fortunately the environments all have a distinctive Middle-Eastern feel in them creating a nice fairy tale like atmosphere. All of this is made even better by the audio with great music and good voice acting.
Gameplay for the most part is fun and fluid in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. You do many different jumping puzzles in the course of the game and the levels are very well designed making the way of navigating through them a fun and satisfying experience. There is one exception though: jumping from wall to wall can be a pain, because you have to time your jump just right to make it work.
Combat is another portion of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time which could be a lot better. The Prince has only a handful of moves in his disposal and it gets repetitive very quickly. Fortunately combat is relatively easy being a real challenge only in couple of sections of the game.
Dagger of Time is what makes this game special. With the dagger you can slow or rewind time and this makes you want to try different crazy things, because the worst that could happen to you is to lose one sand tank and they can be collected very easily. The dagger also makes Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time relatively easy game lasting somewhere around 10 hours or so and there is not much replay value here.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a great start to a great video game trilogy.