Methshin

Price of Persia Review
Platform: PS3
Reviewer: Steven Vogel

Epiphanies come in the oddest forms some times. Up to the very point that I began writing this review, I was sure that I was going to be praising it from my desk with arms outstretched to better convey the satisfaction that was had when I was playing this game. And then I stopped.

“Why am I so happy about this game?” I asked myself while looking at the blank page on my monitor. It wasn’t a long game by any means, it didn’t have the most gripping (pardon the pun) of characters, there was no difficulty in the game whatsoever, in fact, there wasn’t even any punishment for failure, just a simple handshake for your efforts and a coy remark just to remind us all that you are in fact still alive. The gameplay was repetitive, fun, but repetitive, which in a sense, alienates any chance of me playing this game through a second time due to the fact that everything was covered on my first time through.

*on a side note, there are trophies and it’s assumable achievements for not being helped less than a hundred times, which is kind of like a mockery of my ability to play this game, as it seems that the poor girl must’ve reached her arm out for me at least 500 times. There are also rewards for finding “X” amount of light spheres, but considering that is the only benefit to all the labour, nobody really cares, and if they do care, nobody cares about them.*

Back to topic, I remember a time when I would have sworn this game to Damascus and back for being this short and repetitive, I remember when I would proudly state that a game that cannot provide me with entertainment for at least 30 hours was not worth buying, yet I happily forked out the cash to buy the pre-order edition and didn’t think twice about my decision until now. When did I become such a non-jaded gamer? When did I lower the satisfaction bar to accommodate for the games than could not entertain for more than 12 hours?

I mean, back in the NES days, short games like Mario 1 were fun to replay, the graphics were crap, there was NO storyline whatsoever, the gameplay was about as complex as a kinder egg toy, yet we kept going back and back to play it over again, resulting in hundreds of hours clocked into this tiny game. Yet when presented with a game like P.o.P, which by every measure is better, I find myself utterly disappointed and expecting more.

This kind of stuff was satisfying in the ps2 days, but this is the next generation of gaming, so why are you inundating me with the same stuff over and over again? I understand that comparing the Sands of Time series with the re-imagined series is like comparing oranges to grapefruits, but there was so much room for improvement that we should have been offered something a little stronger. Instead we were given a fun game that will be quickly forgotten until they hit us with a sequel. But for all my current disdain, I do have some praise for the game.

I strongly recommend that everyone rent this game, as it is easily worth the shrapnel you’ll spend to rent it. You will get lost in the beauty of the landscapes, you’ll enjoy the banter between our two main characters (which might I add, is optional. The only way to get info on story is to stop and push your L2 button, which will start up a little convo regarding your current situation), you’ll not even notice the wide smile on your face as you vault from wall to pole and back again, and upon returning it to your local video store, you’ll say to yourself “Gosh, I sure am glad I didn’t drop sixty bucks on that”.

I understand that making a game that matches great gameplay with story and staying power is a difficult process, but sometimes you need to think back to the olden days, and figure out what they were doing to make games enjoyable without all the technology we have at our disposal.

Not all is lost for the P.o.P series, in fact, far from it, but Ubisoft is going have to do a lot more to make a game that gets proudly displayed in my game library like the first Sands of Time game did. And because no review is complete without a numerical figure representing it, I give it a 6.5/10.