A solid and fine gaming experience but not as revolutionary as they are trying to make you believe.
The resurrection of the classic Platformer has been a huge success, spawning two sequels. The praise is hard earned but definitely in the right place. Like the original, Sands of Time is a very solid, if a bit unpolished threedimensional platformer. There a basically three main elements in the game. The first is the aforementioned platforming. Jump across gaps, run along walls (!), hold on to narrow ledges and so forth. Next, there is the fighting, wield your sabre and take out the enemiesm leap over them, block, use wall attacks etc. The last aspect is some puzzle solving, which is closely connected to the platformer part. The game has virtually no storyline, just some bearded wizard unleashing some spell which turns the living into undead (which are you enemies). The controls are very good and I was surprised how intuitve the game felt at times, despite the partially quite complicated move chains you have to execute. The graphics, especially the animation of the main character is great. The melee combat works surprisingly well and to this day, this is the only game (except Severance) which delivers an enjoable close combat (melee) experience. The game is great fun but not visionary, the level design is run-of-the-mill and fasciliates the nature of the platform game (huge rooms and halls with even deeper abysses to fall into). There are not a lot of tilesets which is a shame and the "feel" of the level can become quite repetitive soon. In some stages, every corner and wall look the same which can be quite frustrating at times. Furthermore, Sands of TIme suffers from the same camera angle glitch like all games which are trying to be "cinematic", it does not really lower the overall quality of the game, but you will die once in a while just because you were not able to see / turn the camera correctly. The game is "divided" into levels / stages usually made up of a more or less large playing area (a room or a hall etc.) You can save at every "stage". There are an awful lot of (in-game) cutscene sequence which annoyed me because they slowed down the pace and flow of the game significantly.
All in all, a solid and fine gaming experience but not as revolutionary as they want to make you believe. If you are into action-adventure games and or old school platforming (one must admit that the game stays true to the spirit of the classic series), this is definitely something for you. If you are looking for a deeper experience, especially story and "world" wise, you might look elsewhere.
River