Joystiq hands-on: Prince of Persia, the 'it's done!' version
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Stick a fork "do not sell until Dec. 2" label in on it, because Prince of Persia is done. The game has been submitted to Sony and Microsoft for certification and will, we've been promised by series producer Ben Mattes, ship the first week of next month as planned.
Mattes, seemingly as eager to get it in our hands as we were, freed up the controller for a private play session of the game in advance of last night's (for all intents and purposes) wrap party. We unfortunately had to put it down ... eventually. But not before taking in the beginning of the game as you'll experience it in only a few couldn't-be-longer weeks.
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The game's opening introduced us to the latest Prince, a man with his mind on his money (and his money on his mind). He's got a donkey loaded down with gold and aspirations of buying carpets this thick. (You can't see it, obviously, but we're holding our thumb and index finger roughly three inches apart – those are some thick carpets indeed.)
He runs into his partner for most ("most?" how sly!) of the game, Elika, who, apart from having a very overbearing father with a penchant for unleashing evil gods of darkness, possesses magical powers. Oh, and she's a princess.
Following a series of events that see a lush, vivid world turned all dark and corrupted, we got our first real taste of how the game is broken up – or, rather, how it isn't. Outside of the temple that serves as the game's central hub is a map of the game world, conveniently etched into the ground. It's comprised of four main areas, each of which is further divided into multiple sub-locales.
Only a handful are actually "open" at the outset – gaining access to the others requires the cleansing of "fertile ground" and collecting the light spheres that appear once you've done so in order to ascend to new areas. Additionally, each of the four areas also ties into the progressive upgrading of the Prince and Elika's skills. The deeper into them you get, the more powerful you become, all leading up to what will likely be one doozy of a final level.
But we've getting way ahead of ourselves. You have to walk before you can run. Or, in this case, scamper across ceilings. The earliest area we went through put any worries we had about the game's platforming and related control to rest. The game's design team clearly belongs to the camp that believes the first levels of any game should contain a polished, condensed taste of the full experience in order to grab players. In this case, we were firmly in its grasp.
As we'd experienced during our first hands-on with the game, the platforming has a distinct fluidity to it, helped in no small part by a control scheme that's been seriously re-worked over previous installments in the series. There's no holding a button and a direction to stay on a wall while running along it – you simply jump towards it and keep moving, until you want to jump off. At that point, tap "jump" and you do just that, landing where you want to – if your timing's right. It really does feel like a platforming "rhythm game" of sorts, something that Mattes says the team was going for.
The camera can be freely adjusted, but we were happy to find that, in our traditional "we're going to keep our finger off the right stick and see what happens" test, we rarely needed to manually position it ... something that couldn't be said for the last three "modern era" Prince of Persia games.
While we were getting our run-and-jump on, we noticed that Elika never once got in our way, wandered off, or otherwise made us wish she wasn't there. On the contrary, she'd jump onto the Prince's back when we climbed on vines, get seamlessly tossed across gaps by him, and so on. She helped us out, too, by providing a stylized double-jump mechanic and saving us from deadly falls.
That last bit was something of concern when we first played the game. After all, how challenging could the game be if you technically didn't "die?" Oh, plenty. Just because Elika grabs your hand and whisks you out of harm's way doesn't mean you're thrown ahead and given a free pass on a certain challenging jump. No, you're teleported back to the beginning of the platforming "sequence" and must try it again (without falling this time, hopefully).
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So we ran, jumped, scampered, and climbed ... right into confrontations with minor enemies (at first) and later the first of several encounters with the area bosses. We were actually joined by combat designer Thomas Delbuquet at this point (no performance anxiety at all) who responded, "Soul Calibur, God of War, Devil May Cry ... " when asked what some of his influences for the combat in the game were.
It felt like none of those. It felt like, well, Prince of Persia. We were impressed mostly by the fact that these one-of-one fights looked and felt as choreographed as something that would normally require timed button sequences ... without the need for timed button sequences.
The game walked us through several fights' worth of control tutorial until we honestly didn't have to give second thought to what button we were pressing to execute a particular move. By the time we wrapped up our play session, we were sliding between enemies' legs, tossing them into the air, calling in Elika to teleport-kick them, and thwacking away until they teetered on the edges of cliffs – just before we delivered a final blow that sending them plummeting.
What was doubly impressive about the combat system was the fact that, according to Delbuquet, it continues to evolve steadily throughout the course of the game. We were already stringing together our own combos at this point; nothing felt canned.
Nothing about the game feels canned, in fact. From our time with it, it was nothing but fresh. Yes, it's Prince of Persia – but the idealized game you always have in mind when the title's spoken. A balance of strong platforming, mild puzzles, and, in this case, a new (and, so far, much better) combat system. Do not, whatever you do, sign and seal your list of 2008's best games just yet – if the full experience bears out what we played in a little over an hour, you'll need the space for what could be a series' return to form (and then some).
