Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

GOG was like: "Wanna buy four Prince of Persia games? For cheaper than the usual sale price for you, newsletter subscriber." and I was like: "Okay, fine, I'll do a Prince of Persia franchise run." I unchecked The Sands of Time from the offer, though, because Ubisoft had already given it away for free during their 20th anniversary. I also bought a fifth game, The Forgotten Sands, on Connect because GOG doesn't have that one (yet anyway).

Difficult-to-enjoy action platformer

Prince of Persia is an ancient franchise, the first trilogy having been released between 1989 and 1999. Even Prince of Persia 3D, the last one of those games, looks too janky for me to be interested, much like the first six Tomb Raider games. I can't say the following PlayStation 2 era Prince of Persia games look all that smooth either, though, and for that I hadn't touched them until now.

The Sands of Time, released in 2003, is the first reboot of the series. The game has a big Aladdin vibe: from the demeanor of the unnamed Prince protagonist and the antagonist Vizier, who's quite like Jafar. The Prince alongside his father Shahraman's army, ransack an Indian Maharaja's palace where a mystical substance, the Sands of Time, is stored.

The Vizier is deathly ill and reckons the Sands will somehow help him overcome his mortal frailty. He entices the Prince into breaking the container of the Sands with the Dagger of Time also found in the palace and all hell breaks loose. The Sands transform about everyone into monsters of sort.

The game has muffled spoken lines and no subtitles, so I missed quite a lot of what was being said. PC Gaming Wiki does have a note of some method to increase the volume but I didn't bother with it. The game not supporting 1080p was unacceptable, however. That was luckily very easily fixed with a mod.

There was no way the game was going to be optimal to play on mouse and keyboard but gamepad buttons turned out to be unbound. I didn't feel like setting the whole control scheme up and just played with mouse and keyboard. The lack of diagonal input definitely makes things clunkier in combat and platforming. It is sometimes unclear to which direction you need to press on keyboard when the camera is stuck looking at the Prince diagonally for a jump. If you choose wrong, it's usually time to rewind time or go back to a checkpoint if you're out of sand for rewinding. And checkpoints are not common in this game; you'll often have to replay quite a bit. In addition, quitting out of the game means you'll return to a manual save made at a save point.

One iconic janky feature of third person games of the PS2 era are fixed camera positions and angles and how it keeps switching often and jarringly. You turn a corner and the camera switches to the opposite side from your character. The movement direction you're holding is now backwards and you proceed to run back behind the corner. It drives me up the wall.

Amazingly rough combat

Not far into the game, there's basically a combat skill check: do you have what it takes to actually beat The Sands of Time. I got quite stuck on that fight. You with the Maharaja's daughter, Farah, battle against a whole lot of enemies in a throne room. I was absolutely getting my ass handed back to me. As a last resort, I ended up binding the gamepad buttons to try if that would make things easier. I also looked up some advice and was able to beat the fight.

You have to learn to use the attack(s) from vaulting over an enemy, although some enemy types resist it. An even more effective move launches the Prince horizontally off a vertical surface, done by holding down the sword attack button while facing the surface. The attack instantly knocks struck enemies to the ground, allowing you to finish them off with the dagger.

They say that new players tend to foolishly rush to stab downed enemies but I'd say the game doesn't punish you from it that often, especially if the standing enemies are offscreen where they act less aggressively. An unfinished downed enemy will eventually get back up. Sometimes it's indeed better to let them do that, though, to keep yourself in the fight.

Encounters tend to be lengthy: the initial 4 to 5 enemies are never the whole force. Eliminated enemies are replaced by new ones teleporting in, the number of total reinforcements varying from a dozen to twenty. Enemies keep teleporting around too if they get too far so your ability to control them is limited. I often barely made it through a fight: globes nearly all spent and a sliver of health left. You heal from drinking water which you can eventually find not too far after a fight.

Every obstacle a struggle

Even after switching to a controller, platforming stayed plenty challenging. It was fun to some same animations the Assassin's Creed games have. The latter never feature wall running, though. Considering the jank, the wall running is a surprisingly smooth action to perform in this game.

Chimney jumping is one action I had immense trouble with. The window to hit the jump button is pretty narrow; not at all easy like in Tomb Raider: Underworld. You get to do a whole lot of it when you fall down to a deep prison dungeon and have to climb back up. One section has you chimney jumping between two walls moving away from each other, the timing of the jumps being different on every leap.

Farah stays with you more or less through the game after joining you. Sometimes she's in combat to help, though her bow doesn't do much. At least she doesn't need all that much protecting -- until the game's ultimate combat challenge: a room-sized elevator. It was another section I got utterly stuck on. It's not enough to survive yourself, you also have to to protect Farah when an enemy decides to go after her. And when you do that, all the enemies on you follow and the spot Farah stays at becomes cramped. I had to put down the game for a night and return on the morn -- to beat the fight on the first attempt of the day.

What worked for me was to try avoiding killing the hammer guys permanently because they can be vaulted over. That keeps the stage more maneuverable. Instead I focused on removing the other enemies as they started appearing after I had killed one or two of the hammer ones. After surviving the elevator, the final boss fight against Vizier was ridiculously easy in comparison.

There was going to be remake of The Sands of Time -- which was needed without a doubt -- but Ubisoft canceled it earlier this year for whatever reason. Thus there is only this, the original game, with all its jank. There's not even a difficulty selection to make it any easier.