Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is a direct sequel to The Sands of Time and a surprising change in tone. The game is darker and not just visually: the Prince got a new voice actor, music is even heavier on the rock band instruments it's played on (with the Persian elements gone), and enemies get dismembered (bleeding sand instead of blood, though). Warrior Within is also longer than The Sands and non-linear experience, featuring instead quite a lot of going back and forth.

Edgier Prince of Persia

At the end of The Sands of Time, the Prince rewound pretty much all of the game's events. His destiny was apparently to perish with the release of the Sands, however, and now a hulking monster, the Dahaka, hunts him like some agent of Final Destination. The Prince learns that the Sands were created on a distant island by the Empress of Time and he decides that by undoing that, he will save himself. He no longer has the dagger, as he gave it to Farah, but he can still rewind time. I think he got a pendant or something -- I already forgot.

The Prince is intercepted at sea by Shahdee, an underling of the Empress, but he makes it to the island which houses a massive fortress. There he meets Kaileena (played by Monica Bellucci) who helps the Prince to get started on his quest. He needs to repeatedly travel between the present and the past via time portals to achieve his goal.

Memorable opening cinematic

With the same moment-to-moment gameplay

Normally I would be all over this kind of a game premise but the gameplay is as janky as it was in The Sands. There's no pointer to tell you which way to go and the provided map is useless for that purpose as well. Camera doing its thing makes you lose your sense of direction. Negotiating the same obstacles and traps and fighting the same respawned enemies gets absolutely tiresome as you backtrack through the hallways more than once.

There is a difficulty selection this time (and subtitles!) at the start so at least you can make combat more tolerable. With the dagger gone, the Prince's offhand is free to pick up weapons off racks and enemies. The offhand weapons have low durability but they're good while they last, allowing the Prince to execute very effective dual-wield combos. When the weapon is about to break, you can throw it at an enemy -- usually stunning if it hits. Sand powers, too, work a bit better and combat wasn't nearly as much of a struggle.

The only place I had actual trouble was Kaileena's boss fight around midgame. A single combo chain from her can take out half your health even on Easy. Eventually I understood to stop attacking the moment one of my slashes was parried and to dodge twice backwards to get out of her reach. Apparently it's possible to vault over Kaileena into kick and then keep wailing on her to get quickly through the fight. I, however, couldn't follow with an attack after the kick fast enough for Kaileena to not recover, unlike in the video I watched.

Warrior Within has two different endings. To get the better, the canon one, you need to find all the health upgrades so that you can collect the Water Sword. Going for the health upgrades the moment you can access them all can be a pain with the annoying navigation and backtracking. I think the endgame run-around later takes you past all the upgrade spots naturally. The benefit of getting the sword as early as possible is that combat from that point onwards becomes very easy because it does so much damage. Sadly the sword does little to help with the many, many Dahaka chase sequences you have to get through.

And a few technical issues

There was again a need for a bit of tinkering to get the game to run in 1080p. Gamepad buttons were bound by default but I got a strong impression the game wasn't made for an Xbox 360 controller layout. The bindings were all over the place -- parry was on Start, for instance -- and I had to redo them all once more.

I encountered one rather interesting game breaking glitch. A cutscene didn't play and an exit out of a room never opened. I thought jumping into the abyss to reload a checkpoint would help me to progress but the cutscene didn't appear even though the checkpoint was outside the room. Something changed, though, because the Prince's model became invisible with the exception of his hair and weapons. On a following checkpoint reload things got even more exciting as the Prince transformed into a sand wraith -- which is supposed to happen way later. And the cutscene still didn't play, so I decided to reboot the game and go backwards a couple of manual saves.

The save took me to before I had entered a time portal. Unlike previously, the portal wasn't pre-activated and required a puzzle to be completed first as they do normally -- I had thought it odd it had been active like that. Curious how the game got all tangled up from something. But clearly it's a good idea to keep more than one manual save like I did, in case something goes wrong.