Give yourself that same hour to acclimate to the Prince’s controls. I came for the artwork, but I’m staying for the momentum. Altair in Assassin’s Creed is not 100-percent comparable to the Prince after you’ve taken him through some trial and error. Ubisoft Montreal often equated Altair’s movements to that of a car: You held down a trigger and “steered” through the environments. That equation seems fair enough, but I’d offer that Altair’s “car” was an automatic – while the Prince’s vehicle is a stick shift. In Prince of Persia, deft but patient thumb presses are required to navigate. And though his initial steps in any direction feel like they’re in quicksand, the Prince dutifully leaps, wall-runs, ceiling-runs, slides, climbs, and shimmies at a formidable pace.
It feels fantastic when you’re dialed in, using Elika’s magic to enhance your jump across a cavern, then digging your claw into the cliffside to slow your descent, springing towards the opposite wall and coming to a two-point landing on a sand-dusted platform. It also feels fantastic when you wall-run along a chasm lost in darkness, grip a wall-ring to extend your wall-run further, skitter across a patch of ivy to reach some horizontal wood railing, then run along the ceiling to a nearby vertical post.
But strangely enough, as fantastic as those moments are the first time through, they get even better on a repeat run. This time, armed with the slightest bit of foreknowledge as to what obstacles approach, the parkour gets tighter, your movements more calculated, and Elika comes to your rescue far less often.
I was, admittedly, quite intimidated before I picked up Prince of Persia today. I went into it knowing that I may very well not possess the hand-eye coordination to make this a valuable purchase for me. And after playing the demo of – and being severely discouraged by – the fall-and-fall-again Mirror’s Edge, I thought that the Prince was also here to kick ass and chew bubble gum. Thankfully, the Prince didn’t run out of bubble gum.
With frequent breaths to take between acrobatics, there’s also plenty of time and space between sword fights. They operate on a set of timed combos; and while I’m too lazy to learn the myriad combos already available to me (Normal combos, Elika combos, Lift combos, Acrobatic combos, Throw combos and Aerial combos) the early stages patiently taught me one or two that have served me well in the one-on-one combat. I can get lazy quickly when that many combos are at my disposal – there’s something to be said for Fable 2’s one-button combat, to be sure – but the fights are so beautifully animated that I’m starting to sneak peeks at that combo list again, hoping one or two more will sink in.
The only moment of confusion I had was in the open-world but not-quite-open-world map. With paths that spoke out in four directions from a central hub, and the advice to essentially “go wherever you want to go,” I went entirely too far in one direction right off the bat. Prince of Persia wanted me to taste each direction, get a little bit of each “level’s” spice on the tip of my tongue: Not charge wholeheartedly in one direction with a completist attitude driving my compass. I wanted to sweep the map from one end to the other, west to east, no fog of war left un-fogged. That doesn’t work. And Elika, along with her little magical “follow me!” comet that leads the way (when asked) to objectives, won’t automatically turn you around. I was simply told “pick another destination” on the branching map, when in fact only 4 of the 24 other destinations were viable.
But the journey is still young, and though there are imminent fast travel options back to already visited locations, I’m enjoying the journey as much as the destination. Clearing the land of a black corruption unleashed by a dark god – since the good god is pretty much on vacation away from the mortal planes of existence – makes for thirsty work with plenty of free-running left to do. And even though I can’t play a Fable 2 game of fetch with Elika (or emote with her in any other way), it’s great to be splitting the mileage along with a driving partner.
