Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones review

If you can't afford the 30 price tag of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, here's how to make it yourself: take The Sands of Time and remove the rubbish camera and the frustrating combat. Now add all the few bits from Warrior Within that were any good, and sprinkle some extra happiness on top. Enjoy with irrational exuberance.There are no real major upgrades to this title, but it's easily the best in the series because it does what it does very well. You control the eponymous Prince, and this time actually in his homeland of ancient Iran (previous titles being set in India and on the Island of Time). The game combines puzzle-solving and death-defying platforming antics - involving running along walls, sliding down curtains and dodging spinning blades - with fluid blade-based combat. It's a doubly-satisfying outing, because you have the enjoyment upon working out what to do next followed by the triumph of executing it correctly. It's also possessed of a very rare gameplay feature: the ability to rewind the last few seconds should you make everything go pomegranate-shaped. You can only do this a few times before your sand tanks need recharging, so use it wisely: you'll also need sand to slow down time (ideal for dumbfounding enemies and avoiding getting sliced by sawblades) and to send out lethal whirlwinds.In rescuing the heroine and narrator of The Two Thrones, the Prince has inadvertently changed history so that the events of the previous two games never happened. Farah (the heroine of the first game) now has no memory of her adventures with the Prince, much to his dismay. Even worse, the evil Vizier of The Sands of Time has gained possession of the chronology-warping grains; and with them has created an army of sand monsters to do his bidding and turned himself into a large vulturine demon. Standard fare for this series, then. But this time around the nameless Prince doesn't escape the Sands' transmogrifying effects, and throughout the game fights with his sand-monster persona over who has control over their shared body, trading acerbic comments on everything that happens.The dark side/good side lead character is an overdone plot device nowadays, and quite frankly it's as tiresome as it sounds. The first few times you play as Dark Prince are especially vexatious until you get 'into the zone' for them. You have no control over when Dark Prince takes over, and his health gradually deteriorates until his hold over the Prince's body is broken. Stepping into a body of water does the trick - sand creatures hate the stuff. Until then you can top up his health, and stave off death, by defeating enemies and by smashing vessels containing sands of time (of which there are conveniently many). The Dark Prince's sections are very frantic, and working out what to do quickly and hitting your enemies hard is vital. Fortunately, the enemies are usually weaker than those the Prince encounters, and the Dark Prince is stronger than he.Dark Prince wields a whip-like blade called the Daggertail, which is both a weapon and a tool for pulling faraway objects closer and swinging from overhead fixtures. This is rather fun, but everything else about being the Dark Prince isn't. Gamestyle would have much preferred Dark Prince were left out completely, and the Prince able to switch between the Daggertail and his normal weapon. It would have made minimal difference to the cutscenes and the game would be significantly more delectable, and perhaps worth an extra point.The Prince is still very much the star of the show, and if only his outfit had sleeves he'd have somewhere up which to put his new tricks. The most excellent of these is the speed kill: if you can approach an enemy from behind without him hearing you, a tap of the triangle button will let the Prince spring into action and finish the fiend with a few quick slashes, subject to you timing the next few button presses correctly. As with anywhere else, though, you can always rewind time and try again if you fail. The speed kill is satisfying and useful, and an absolute lifesaver when you find a sand fountain. These are guarded by at least three goat-masked soldiers, and more will respawn unless you can kill them all quickly. The sense of achievement when you chain together a set of speed kills and eliminate them all without taking a scratch yourself is huge, and the move is well-designed enough that areas that call for it aren't turned into boring stealth sections. If you prefer, though, you can still take out your foes in the normal way. Try running up them, flipping them over then stabbing them, or grabbing their weapons and throwing them back.Travel through the ruins of Persia is speeded up by the new chariot races; these aren't really a gameplay staple, and could probably be removed without hurting the game much. They make a reasonably good topping to The Two Thrones' cake, though - sideslamming an enemy chariot into a wall and leaving the splintery wreckage in our dust made Gamestyle happy. They're a little too long to be without checkpoints, but a good effort nonetheless.There are some other enjoyable little touches that link together pieces of the action. When running along walls, the Prince can also use springy shutters to launch himself away on a different trajectory - ricocheting off a shutter and landing into a speed kill is really fantastic. Other new interactive pieces of the environment (ranging from stony dungeons to sunny, leafy gardens and shanty streets) are wall grooves the Prince can scale up and down, and plates in the wall he can puncture with his dagger and hang from, so as to give you a breather for strategy in the middle of a wall-run.After the nu-metal embarrassment that was Warrior Within, the sun-dappled The Two Thrones is an excellent return to form for the Prince of Persia, who has regained his English accent and no longer cusses and grumbles. It's what the first game should have been, and the only real blunder on the part of the development team is the Dark Prince (although it would have been nice if they'd also done without that grating menu select noise). For the most part, this is a fantastic and well-balanced little adventure and is so much fun in the face of its flaws that they can be mostly forgiven.