Review: Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Warrior Within (2004) is an action platform game loosely based on the classic Prince of Persia games by Jordan Mechner. It's the second game by Ubisoft. The first Ubisoft game was okay, if a little shallow. The second was intended to appeal more to hardcore gamers and made grittier and darker.

Gameplay
Part of the new darker PoP (Prince of Persia) is more combat. Unfortunately, the combat still isn't very fun. You have to learn the techniques that work on individual enemies by trial and error. The female assassins will rape you if you jump over them using the jump key. But if you jump over them using the offhand key, everything's peachy. Essentially, the combat makes no sense. Also some enemies are recycled and come back ten times as strong as they were before for no apparent reason. The camera sets you up for a fair amount of offscreen attacks, which will often knock you off a ledge. Additionally the new giants you have to fight are mostly a waste of time.

As for the other half of the equation, the platforming leaves a lot to be desired, as well. For one thing, I found navigation a chore. Some people enjoy this puzzle aspect to the game. I find it a complete waste of time, especially when bad camera positioning is the only thing making the puzzle hard. And good luck to you if you've started a difficult section (platforming or combat) with no sands of time as restarting your game has an annoying lag while you watch enemies gloating or the empty hole you fell into, then an ugly splash screen telling you your dead (Duh.), and finally you get to reload your game. No fun.

Theatrics
Warrior Within definitely makes an effort. There's a plot. It's complicated. I didn't care. There was just so little of it, and it was so irrelevant to the action.

Aesthetics
Graphically the game was okay. I don't think I played with the settings turned all the way up and still had some frame rate hitches. Most of the textures were nice if you stopped to look at them, but for the most part, brown and gray prevailed, in accordance with the grittier style.

Overall I'd say Jordan and the Ubi team had a lot of fun with the idea of taking the prince to a darker place, but never really managed to pull it together into a coherent game.

Two out of five.