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I wouldn't call the combat "satisfying" because there's so little variety to it, and it's pretty much just hitting whatever buttons until the enemy's health drops enough. There's little reason to move around, use specific types of attacks, or really do anything but wait for an opening and slash a few times. Even if you bother to learn the long combos, the fights all take longer than I have the patience for, and the closest the game comes to adding any sort of challenge is making you use a specific attack based on what color the enemy turns, which tends to be more of an annoyance than anything else because by the end of the game, they're changing colors in the middle of your combos, so it's even more futile to try anything but a few slashes at a time. You've got four Corrupted and one generic enemy, and the game encourages you to avoid fighting the generic enemies whenever possible. There's no reward at all for the combat except for plot progression. It may be because of the "Prince of Persia" title inviting comparisons to the Sands of Time trilogy, which had much more dynamic combat including multiple enemies of many types, but the combat in this game feels terrible to me and almost always makes me want to skip it. I'll grant that the characters have the potential to be interesting, but I think "push a button whenever you want to stop everything and hear characters talk instead of playing the game" is a bad way to try to balance story and gameplay. I even stopped after each Fertile Ground to hit the talk button until they ran out of things to say, but neither character was ever interesting enough to make me want to hear more of their story. Making the story context-sensitive doesn't help matters either - miss a bit of dialogue because you decided to solve the puzzle instead of stopping to chat? Welp. I've complained about it before, but because there's almost no linear progression and there's no order to the levels except that each of the four areas has a first level and a last level, there's absolutely no way for the characters or their relationship to meaningfully evolve over the course of the game. Instead, you've got closed vignettes that must be able to happen in any order and thus can't refer to each other outside of very limited firsts and lasts. It allows about as much depth as FMV games back in the early CD era, where the characters had to look pretty emotionless most of the time because reflecting any reaction to previous events would require a separate clip. Here, it would just be another audio line. I can sort of appreciate the characters in this format because you know when pressing the button will do something interesting, but at the same time, there's no real sense of progress within the story as a separate consideration from the game objectives (heal all the Fertile Grounds and defeat the Corrupted). You could watch a random cutscene in Sands of Time and tell about how far into the game it was by how the characters got along. (And how much of the Prince's shirt remained.) You'd get exactly the same dialogue if the windmills were the second to last level you cleared. And even then, only if you decide that pushing the talk button is more fun than moving on in the game.
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Jan 4, 2016 01:16
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I don't think it's an issue with the difficulty per se, or with the checkpoints vs. rewind decision specifically, so much as the complete lack of a difficulty curve. Sands of Time went from a tutorial area that introduced one movement ability at a time to a series of increasingly complex and complicated climbing challenges, ending with the epic Tower of Dawn sequence, where you ride a nearly interminable elevator while fighting a few dozen enemies, then have to climb the outside of that same tower without the ability to rewind time anymore, with some of the most difficult challenges yet, but you're ready for them because the game has been building to them the whole time. It starts with enemies that have no defense against your combat moves, builds to enemies that can block various techniques, and ends with enemies that require actual reflexes rather than flashy combos. It's not just the story, but the game itself building up as you progress. You get additional health, more sand tanks, and stronger swords, which makes you feel stronger even though the game balances that with tougher enemies. Strictly speaking, 2008 has no upgrades at all. The four powers you get are just additional colored plates you can use to get into a few new areas, which effectively act as keys to locked doors more than movement abilities. Even Forgotten Sands Wii let you upgrade the situational movement abilities so you could eventually use them anywhere AND gave them all combat applications, even if they weren't very good. In 2008, the last area you go to could be the first one someone else goes to, so they have to maintain a pretty consistent difficulty throughout. Okay, so they add blobs at a certain point to make things more annoying, but it's exactly the same platforming, only now you have to wait sometimes. This game seems to discourage that - almost every movement in the other trilogy gave you a chance to stop and think, look around, and decide what to do. There are enough long sequences in this game where you have to keep moving that when there's a break, you usually just keep going and rely on your reflexes to hit the right buttons at the right time. This latest video covers my issues with the level design as well, going along with the movement plates. The other games had recognizable geography, even if it was contrived at times. You had to climb walls and swing on poles in Sands of Time and Warrior Within because the palaces were falling apart, blocking the normal paths, and the traps had been activated, presumably including things like collapsing most of the floors. The Two Thrones stuck to the rooftops mostly, so the roads that would normally be traversable are a fatal fall away and you have to climb stuff. And the climbing is the thing - there are sequences of ledges or poles to jump across, and they lead somewhere. 2008 is four giant rings of outer walls, and then you fly randomly around or jump to random surfaces and bingo bango, you're in a level. How DID the Ahura get around? Did they all have climbing claws? The things the Prince of the other trilogy did at least seemed generally possible for a human, if only one at peak physical condition and with excellent reflexes. This game just leaves me confused as to why they don't just fly straight to the end.
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Jan 11, 2016 16:32
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And recognizing that I've pretty much been a bundle of negativity so far, here's a double-post with some positivity that isn't really relevant until the end of the game, but I don't want anyone to think I've come here just to dump on a game because people like it and I don't. Even though most of the characterization is hidden behind the push-to-talk button and there's no direct incentive to use that, especially in the middle of a level when you're usually trying to get to the end, the story itself is pretty good even if you just let the characters be their bland cutscene selves and go from objective to objective. When I beat the game, I genuinely wanted to play a sequel to see what would happen next. Maybe it's just that the ending was that good, which is why the compliment isn't relevant quite yet. There is, at least, enough story along the required path to keep things interesting and engaging, or I probably would have stopped playing long before then.
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Jan 11, 2016 16:48
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GamesAreSupernice posted:Regardless of what the gameplay can be classified as, or how it compares to the Sands of Time trilogy, it seems pretty appropriate for what they intended to make. This is, I think, the point where we agree to disagree. I think many of us, myself included, tend to take an egocentric view of things like games and take it as read that what we enjoy more is better. Jak & Daxter went from a platformer to a sandbox/open-world mission-based platformer to, of all things, a racing game. It wasn't a bad racing game, but for people who don't like racing games, it wasn't likely to be a very enjoyable game. Final Fantasy went from RPGs to MMORPGs and what amount to slightly interactive movies, and the general consensus among fans of the series is that the games have been going downhill as a result. This game is more or less a different genre of game while retaining the same title, and while it loses everything I enjoyed about the earlier games in the series, obviously there will be people who like it more than its predecessors. I still don't understand why companies can't just come up with new names for completely different games, especially when there's absolutely no story correlation at all, but they'd rather sell one game to a bunch of angry people than save that goodwill for future endeavors. I really doubt anyone would have looked at this game and said "This is too much like Sands of Time. Why didn't they just call it Prince of Persia?" I bought it expecting something that I didn't get, and I don't think many of the people who wanted this game were attracted by the title of a series they obviously didn't like that much, but that's marketing for you. They made a decent game for some people, then sold it to a different group of people.
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Jan 12, 2016 01:22
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