Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

In my quest for redemption, I must control time itself.

NA release: 18th November 2003
EU release: 20th February 2004
JP release: N/A
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher: Ubisoft
NGC Magazine Score: 91%
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

Plenty of games in the GameCube era attempted to do more with platforms, particularly shimmying along edges and jumping across poles. However, it all felt unbelievably slow and clunky. Prince of Persia, on the other hand, managed to make all these movement techniques flow much better than previous games had done, and a lot of the climbing feels like later games such as Uncharted, such as parts crumbling after you go past them.

One core mechanic is the Sands of Time, held within a dagger. They can rewind time a short amount so you can try again. Considering this, I was very surprised at the lack of surprises and traps in store. All the hazards are telegraphed clearly and you’ll mainly be using the rewind for when you jump in the wrong direction due to the game’s atrocious camera – it would be so much better if it didn’t try to help.

The dagger is also the only way to fully dispatch enemies, meaning you have to perform a finishing move to stop them from getting back up. This is just tapping the Y button. You can also vault over enemies to attack from behind. It looks cool visually, but the combat feels a bit too simple, and many sections just have enemies spawning in for far too long.

Another issue with the game is the audio. The sound mixing is very wonky, meaning that the dialogue often alternates from being loud and quiet, and I missed a load of lines due to this. There’s also no subtitles to make up for this. The main stuff that comes through is the annoying complaining from the characters, it makes it difficult to like them. Still, it’s an enjoyable game that pulled off this style of platforming really well.

Classic Prince of Persia

You can also unlock the original Prince of Persia, which has very impressive animations for a game from 1989. The game does have very awkward controls, with a lot of delay and moving feels very stiff. Still a nice extra.

Fun

The game reeks of quality from start to finish. Maybe there’s too much fighting, and you’ll see a lot of similarly themed puzzles, but when it looks this cinematic and plays this intuitively, it’s possible to forgive almost anything.
Martin Kitts, NGC Magazine #90

Remake or remaster?

A remake was is in the works, but was cancelled. I thought it was a better choice than a remaster.

Official Ways to get the game

The original version of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is available on Steam.