the workshop tumblog

Beat Prince of Persia (360) last night: Thoughts

From my post on the Untitled Image “Now Playing” topic.

I really enjoyed it overall but it does have a few issues.

My main issue with the game is it’s ridged controls, they just aren’t fluid or responsive as I felt they should be and often were the cause of my “death”. Most of the time you guide the Prince into an action and he will go into semi-auto.. For example when you jump at a wall; depending on your angle you will either wall-run (as far as he can without footing) or climb up it (as far as you can without footing) and you have control over when to jump or to slide down the wall…
I’d almost rather have to press a button to wall-run so I can’t accidentally do the wrong action, it would take some more skill but in the long run could be more easy. The other bad thing is that it almost seems to remember your button presses, so you can easily kill yourself by mashing a button; once the Prince is done doing the previous action he will usually do whatever the last button press was (before the action) even if things have changed (during the action) and you want to do something else you can’t abort.

The easy “quick retry” that everyone talks about, (you never actually can die in this game and some feel it makes the game too easy) I feel was needed to keep the controls from ruining the game. If I had to wait for a level to re-load every time I “died” I’d have thrown the game out the window within the first few hours.

The combat was really strange at first since it’s really nothing like what you’d expect. It’s all one-on-one fights and they are quite few.. Once you understand the combat system it’s actually quite fun. The combat is all about blocking/countering and using the right attacks at the right time.

The art design and over all feel of the game was the best part. If there were none of the above mentioned issues this game could truly be a favorite, but it falls just short, like I did so many times jumping off a wall in the game.