Press A to not die

I've been a little lazy in writing blog posts lately, and as such, I have a backlog of three different things I need to write about. Hopefully I can put them all together and then actually get ahead a few days.

Over the weekend, I started playing Prince of Persia. This new one is sort of a series "reboot." The prince is less gritty, the art style is more cartoony, and the gameplay is more... easy.

The game starts off with the prince running into Elika, this game's princess/damsel. While running after her, you get a basic tutorial in moving and combat. The first thing I noticed is how dumbed down the the climbing/moving is. In previous Prince of Persia games, you would run towards a wall and hold down a trigger button on the gamepad to wall run. Here you simply jump into the wall. To run up a wall: jump into it. To climb a wall: jump into it. I'm semi-convinced you could play through most of the game by just pushing the gamepad forward and pressing the jump button at the appropriate time (the game even swings you around poles automatically). While it does provide some variety (sometimes you have to press B, and every once in a while, Y), the game is just really simplified. A friend of mine said that they "Assassin's Creed-ed it." That felt like a fitting description to me. It actually seems to be a growing trend in games, i.e., making the player feel more awesome while requiring them to do less. While I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of it, I can at least understand it.

Combat in this game is pretty standard fare for Prince of Persia games. There do seem to be fewer combos, although perhaps that's just my imagination. Also, Elika is always right behind you, and by pressing the Y button, she'll perform a magic attack on whatever you are targeting. Perhaps I'm missing something awesome, but stringing acrobatic magic combos together seems to be the easiest and fastest way of killing pretty much everything. You basically just mash the Y button, then push the A button once, then mash the Y button some more. In Warrior Within, the combat felt really satisfying. If I vaulted over an enemies head and stabbed them in the back, I felt like I had earned it. Here, I mostly feel like I'm just mashing buttons and watching enemies die.

As far as difficulty goes, this game isn't. Difficult, that is. If you fall, Elika will fly down and save you. If you get knocked down in battle, Elika blasts the enemy away so you can get up. While the game mechanic is at least partially fitting, it is in no way fulfilling. If I fell in Sands of Time, I rewound time. I was still safe on the ledge before my jump, but I actually had to expend some energy/effort to save myself. This game has no such satisfaction. While I don't think the game designers need to be our enemies like they were in the old NES games, I'm not retarded and I don't need to be coddled ALL the time.

My final big beef with the game so far is the collecting that is required. The game sends you to a specific area, where you kill a boss and then "cleanse" the region. Afterward, Seeds of Light appear that you must collect. You need to collect enough of them so that you can unlock powers which enable you to get to new areas. The mechanic feels really artificial to me, something the designers sort of tacked on to force you to play through the areas more or even something they could tie Achievements/Trophies too. Needless to say, I will be collecting the absolute minimum number of seeds required to finish the game.

The one good thing about the game so far is the art style. The game has a delightful cel-shaded 3D style, something I haven't seen since the game XIII. I'm definitely a fan of it.

This is the first game I've played this far into in a while where I wasn't really looking forward to finishing it. The game isn't THAT bad, so I probably will finish, but there just isn't anything about the game that I'm excited about. I'm pretty sure it'll just be more of the same. I only wish this game's designers had been as creatively awesome as its artists.