An interesting "adventure action" game that has some interesting appeal.
User Rating: 8.6 | Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time PC
Prince of Persia is divided into two main types of gameplay. There's the combat sequences where you fight a battle with a bunch of monsters and there are the "adventure" sequences where you have to find your way out of a room or to the next level. The adventure element of the game doesn't quite meet the standards one would expect to find in a pure adventure game. There are a few puzzles to solve in the game, but there's nothing terribly difficult or anything that requires much thought. This part of the game takes advantage of the awesome character animation done to enable the character to perform incredible feets of acrobatics. You can climb and jump from columns, do flips and jumps off of bars and ropes, hang along the edge of a cliff and run sideways along a wall. Quite often, you find yourself standing in a room and you need to find the right combination of all the acrobatics to figure out how to progress. You need to notice that you can climb a certain column, jump across to a ledge, climb up to another ledge, jump back and forth between two walls, etc. Some people might not find what basically amounts to jumping puzzles, appealing, but I for one did. In these acrobatic moves, the game is pretty careful about maintaining control of your character. For example, you usually need to simply point your character in the right direction and jump. If you are close to a valid jump point, the character will make the right moves. You also don't have to worry about walking off the edge of a wall or anything like that as your character will automatically grab on to the edge as he falls. So, there's no worries about having to be precise and generally, you do all of this without distraction from killing bad guys. I found these acrobatics to be quite entertaining and a pleasure to perform. I found myself thinking about Splinter Cell which I enjoyed for its remarkable ability at having your character move realistically and in unusual ways. Aside from the adventuring part of the game, there are battle sequences you engage in when you encounter bad guys. Combat is fairly straightforward. Click to attack, right click to block. There are a few special moves involving jumping and there's the use of your dagger as a secondary weapon. The dagger adds a interesting element to the game not normally found in FPS games. Your dagger holds an amount of sand that you can use for various actions. You can rewind the game up to 10 seconds. You can freeze your enemies or you can just slow down time. You fill up your dagger by attacking enemies who are unconscious with your dagger. In Prince of Persia, you cannot simply save and load the game whenever you want. The game has a decent number of discreet save points. So, you cannot save in the middle of a battle or in the middle of a tough "get through the traps" sequence. However, that's what the rewind allows you to do. You can undo your mistakes (at least a certain number of them). That said, there are definitely some complaints to be said about the game. The gameplay doesn't really progress much throughout the game. The end of the game plays pretty much like the beginning of the game. You get a little stronger, can carry more sand and have an extra power or two, but other than that, the combat and puzzles don't vary a whole lot. There also is not a great deal of variety in the enemies to fight. The fact that the game is relatively short mitigates this however. If the game went on much longer, it might have started to get old, but this was okay. It's also been repeated quite a bit, but the camera also takes a bit getting used to. It works kind of like a third-person camera, but you don't have total control over it. You can move the camera around as you desire, but if you try to move it into a position the game doesn't want (like into a wall), then game bumps it back. The game also automatically changes the camera position as you progress through the game which changes the meaning of the movement directions. It adds a bit a dramatic flare to the game as the camera switches to the appropriate angles for what you are doing, but if the camera doesn't do exactly what you want, it can be annoying. I'm not sure I would want to try and manually move the camera as I'm running along a wall. The graphics are great and the sound effects are also great. It really does a good job at making you feel like you're in these vast temples and caverns. Be warned if you're afraid of heights though. 
