Prince of Persia is ultimately repetitious, but you won't care as its aesthetic beauty and solid design will hook you.
Like the POP's on last generation's consoles, the game play relies heavily on gravity defying, acrobatic platforming cut in with segments of sword fighting. The prince ostensibly has a background in humanly impossible circus performing and effortlessly wall runs, ceiling crawls and pole hops across landscapes and up obstacles with such grace that the actions almost seem plausible. Additionally, thanks to the prince's female companion, his repertoire of abilities is extended even further.
One of the more clever changes to the POP canon is Elika, a princess that crosses paths with the protagonist and traverses through the game with the player. She is always visible during game play as she follows the prince and has special magic and teleportation abilities that contribute to the platforming elements of the game. She grants the prince the ability to second jump by magically appearing underneath him and physically thrusting him back into the air. Additionally, when a jump is missed and the prince falls to his theoretical doom, Elika flies in and saves him, dropping him back on the last piece of solid ground he stood on (essentially acting as a checkpoint). She has many other contributions, but those will be talked about later.
In past POP games, the prince's visually complex movements were executed with a gratifying combination of ease and control, leaving a great balance of difficulty and finesse. However, Ubisoft felt that the controls required further simplification as most actions now revolve around single button presses through lengthy scenes of acrobatics. Thus, the player feels less like he/she's the performer, but instead the spectator. Even the theoretical powers the player receives later when he/she lands on different colored nodes are nothing more than interactive cut scenes.
To make things even simpler, in case the player makes a mistake, there are fail safe measures implemented to pat the player on the back. Imprecise jumping from the player is slightly auto-corrected to reposition the prince to go where he's supposed to. Elika has the ability to chart out the correct path that the player should be going if he/she gets lost by emitting a ball of light that travels the EXACT route that should be taken. This can be a folly as it is too helpful and abandons the sense of exploration, which is one of the more entertaining aspects of the game. Of course, the latter is only an option and does not need to be used if it is not desired.
The sword battles are also stream-lined to become more like cinematic sequences by implementing combos with timed button presses (starting to see a pattern in the way the game controls). There is a parry and dodge system, along with attack by sword, your hands or the use of Elika's magic. All of these can be combined in sequence to perform varying levels of combos; the player has to discover the better and longer combos through experimentation. The visual choreography for these battles is great and stringing together combo attacks can be satisfying, but avid action fans will probably be thrown off by this simple design. However, fighting takes up a very small portion of this mostly platform-oriented game.
The game's story takes place in an imaginary kingdom set in a fictional middle-eastern desert. Elika is a princess struggling to regain control of her broken empire, forsaken by the dark gods of her kingdom's mythology. Her plight is to revitalize all the "fertile grounds" under her kingdom, which have been overcome and cast in a dark and dead gloom. Though the over-arching story is cliché and forgettable, it is forgivable as the focus is not in the back story, but the character dialogue.
As there are really only two characters in this game, it was important for Ubisoft to nail the chemistry between the two; I was surprised by how well they accomplished this feat. Elika is a mature and diplomatic character that is committed to her royal duties to her shattered kingdom. Though she has little comprehension of the wayfarer lifestyle of the prince, her charm and wit pairs well with the snarky sarcasm of the prince.
The prince is a wandering, free-spirited bandit whose royal lineage is never really disclosed and leaves a lot of conjecture up to the player. He falls into helping Elika in a chance meeting when he's looking for his lost donkey packed with booty from a recently raided tomb. What is originally a motive of royal rewards, the prince slowly becomes entrenched in Elika's strife as he grows more fond of her. His boorish, yet often times clever lines to Elika lend well to their cohesion as she always has a good follow-up comment to his. Their interactions are built to be flirtatious and build chemistry, and it works for the most part as it gradually builds up to the conclusion of the game.
This POP takes an un-orthodox approach to story telling where the player can get as much (or little) of it as he/she desires. All the pertinent plot points are unavoidable and are triggered at a select few points in the game. These segments are very short and stick mostly to the facts. If the player wishes to divulge more in the game's lore and supporting story to the issue at hand, they can opt to enter into a 15-second snippet conversation between Elika and the prince at any point in the game play. This process can be repeated for more original dialogue between the characters, and it is generally witty and well-written. Eventually, dialogue will repeat, but it takes awhile and as soon as the plot has moved forward, the banks of conversation topics change again to update to the current situation.
Though the simplicity diminishes the satisfaction of the game's experience, the enjoyment from the level design and artistic style is plentiful enough to compensate. The prince's move-set never really expands with further play in the game, however the level design is so expertly crafted that the way in which his moves are implemented is surprisingly varied. Additionally, it never gets old watching the fluidity of your character performing his superhuman abilities.
The cel-shaded, artistic environments that the prince moves through are quite captivating as well and further enhance the game's enjoyment. All the settings are open canvases, vibrant with color and moving parts that leave an organic sense of life to the world. Adding to the visual design, the orchestral composition of the music is top notch and blends perfectly with the free-spirit and organic tones of the game. The scenes are captivating and some of the game's greatest moments come in the environmental set-pieces such as one where the character is flying high into the sky, bouncing off of hot air balloons in the setting of a cloudy, windy mountain side.
The only problem with the levels is not their artistic design, but the game's pacing and layout. The entire game consists of traveling to a new fertile ground and finding the focal point where you fight a short boss battle and purify the landscape (which looks great as plant life spreads across the landscape dowsing it in greenery, akin to Okami). This procedure is then repeated many times over until the eventual conclusion. It doesn't help that the only extra abilities earned feel less like a game play addition and more like getting a key to open a locked door as they have no use except for in the areas you need them.
The game is ultimately repetitious, but the immaculate production values in well-crafted and aesthetically beautiful level design along with the games compelling characters makes for a journey well worth taking.