I want my money back....
Then there's the actual gameplay; this game was recommended by gamespot as a hack-and-slash fiesta by those who enjoy games like Blade of Darkness (terrific) and Rune (not bad at all). Typical superficial Gamespot analysis. This game is nothing like those classics. The camera angles are total garbage, not at all what I expected from a third-person action game. Right off, there were instances where the Prince all but disappeared from sight, hidden behind some obstruction or recess as he went about on his frenetic way, and often the camera freelook and change camera options are completely non-applicable and locked out. At least there should have been an option to lock the camera in a trailing view, so it was always at the Prince's back. That would have been a HUGE improvement and might have made this game exponentially more playable and intuitive.
And speaking of intuituve, the controls are all over the place, not at all tight or second-nature, no matter whether you use a gamepad or a mouse-keyboard scheme. (Much of this I can directly attribute to the aforementioned camera being fixed up on the wall somewhere.) Basically, you find yourself running to and fro, back and forth, thumbs gyrating, hammering the "attack" and "block" and "jump" buttons repeatedly to try to make something happen -- and sometimes something does happen, but often you don't really get *how* it happened. There is no finesse, none of the timing and the deliberate, impressive, satisfying unleashing of moves that occur in classic hack-and-slash (again, I will refer to Blade of Darkness; it had all this in spades). Basically, the Prince runs and leaps around like a monkey on espresso, slicing and slashing and bouncing off the walls, and the camera sits there looking down at it all while he ricochets around the screen like a ping-pong ball. It is a hollow experience: It feels superficial and it feels poor...action games shouldn't be this hard to get into and this hell-bent on limiting user control and user immersion...did I mention that I *hate* having to replay the same ten minutes over and over? Talk about pulling you out of a gaming mood. Makes one feel like a mule chasing a carrot on a stick. Fun stuff!
Another thing I do not get is the weapons themselves. There is no rating on each, and it is often difficult to identify the weapon until you pick it up, and even then it's pretty vague; there are various types of swords and daggers but I couldn't see any difference in the way they perform. Axes were easy to distinguish but again, the prince swings everything around like he's gone loco and the blood flies regardless. Click-click-click goes both of the attack buttons. Zim-zam-zoom goes the Prince. Sound exciting? It's not. Sigh....
Whatever temporary weapon you happen to be carrying in your left will wear out quickly indeed, but the sword that's fixed in your right fist is apparently imperishable, and is not interchangeable except during several scripted, predetermined phases in the game. And if you throw away the weapon in your left hand, it disappears; you can pick any particular lefty weapon up only once, once it's gone, it's gone, so it forced me to be real nervous about selecting and casting away weapons, and real nervous about accidentally tapping the "throw" button, which also happens to be the "pick up" button. It's a strange weapon system.
The graphics look fantastic, by the way, and they play smooth on my archaic old GeForce 4 Titanium, joined with my P4 2.66 GHz and 1 GB of Ram. But to me, nice graphics are about as important as looks on a muscle car. Important? Sure. You betcha. But not the whole story. For a serious ride, I'll take a tweaked-out Grand National with the piss-poor original paint any day, and be happy as a pig in you-know-what. The car looks pretty good, all in all, (especially when you're twenty feet away), but never mind the paint job: the car drives like it wants to be driven! By the same token, a game should play like it *wants* to be played, graphics notwithstanding; it shouldn't be an exercise in head scratching , excessive control adaptation, and restarting from level one again and again.
I just do not get this game. I never played its predecessor, the Sands of Time, but I picked this one up expecting to get into some satisfying melee fighting and work my way through some tense, atmospheric levels. It fell far short of my expectations (or is perhaps another type of game entirely from what I expected or would have wished). But hey, that's just my initial take on it. I could be wrong....