If you are a long time fan of the Prince of Persia series, you may find yourself a bit turned off by your first impression of the new Prince and his quest. But if you look at the game as a separate entity from its predecessors and not as a sequel, you will likely find yourself enthralled by a beautiful world being torn apart by an apocalyptic celestial battle. The beauty of this world alone is sufficient to get one through the story, but the ease of gameplay may derail your experience enough to damage your perception of the stunning presentation and moving narrative.

Our tale begins with a man in a desert searching for his camel. This camel, named Farah in a nod to previous entries in the series, is loaded with gold and has gotten lost in a sandstorm. This storm eventually drives the prince into the depths of a canyon where he encounters an unexpected individual: Princess Elika. Elika is, interestingly enough, attempting to sneak into her own city in order to reach a temple. The Prince gallantly begins to protect Elika from the city guards, but in the most ignoble manner proceeds to complain about the situation that she is getting him into. This trend follows throughout the game's story. Elika and the Prince make their way to the mysterious temple only to find that they were too late. Elika's father has successfully managed to partially free Ahriman, the god of darkness, from his prison deep within the structure.

Quite simply, Prince of Persia has a stunning visual style.

From here, Elika and the Prince go on a quest to heal the city's fertile grounds which will subsequently trap Ahriman back inside his jail. These grounds have been overcome with corruption and will need to be renewed before Ahriman can escape. The narrative takes many twists and has enough depth to keep things interesting, but the real beauty of the story comes in the development of the game's two primary characters. The Prince is an excessively reluctant hero, and he will frustrate you at times. Elika, however, is charming, devoted and everything one could want in a heroine. What makes the pair shine is how they play off of each other. At the outset, they are complete opposites. Eventually though, things begin to shift. It is subtle at first, but they begin to rub off on each other. By the end of the game, the two have shed their excesses and become balanced, complete characters. They ultimately combine to provide a wonderful sense of purpose and drive to help keep things moving. However, there is a problem with this relationship, and it can be seen most prominently with the gameplay.

A common issue with sidekicks often comes in practice. They tend to get in the way and make a game feel clumsy. With Elika, the exact opposite is true. She is too useful. While her magical abilities do add a nice nuance to the platforming and combat, she is also there to save you whenever you are falling to your death. While this is nice because it avoids game over screens, it takes away any sense of punishment for failure. Because of this, there is only a small sense of reward for your success. Achievement is further cheapened by the ease of movement around the city. The Prince has retained all of his old moves (and an added roof run) but the game provides compass magic through Elika that tells you exactly how to get where you need to be. This takes away any inherent puzzle elements that go along with the platforming genre, and can dampen the experience. Puzzles as a whole are only a tiny part of Prince of Persia this time around, and if you were one who appreciated the depth of puzzling in the series' previous iterations, you may be disappointed.

Besides the usual tricks of jumps and wall runs, the game uses empowered plates to generate special on-rails segments of action. While the concept behind these is good, the application is poor. The visual effects applied to using the plate which grants you flying ability make it difficult to maneuver, two different types of jumping plates are really just glorified springs, and the final type of plate, one that allows one to run along walls, often leaves you simply running in a straight line to another. This system does work well when the plates are placed strategically, but all too often you'll be wondering why you're forced to bother with them at all. Indeed, this is probably the greatest issue with Prince of Persia's gameplay. There is simply minimal challenge to the jumps, which can lead to some tedium. That said, there are still moments when the jumping puzzles are spectacular. One can be swept away by long strings of jumps, wall runs, roof runs, and plate transportation. It's just sad that there are almost as many tedious moments as there are enjoyable ones.

The combat, in many ways, is similar to the platforming. In an interesting design choice, you will never fight more than one enemy at a time. This focus on only one enemy essentially turns every encounter into a mini-boss fight. This gives the combat a complexity that is tough to match outside of the fighting genre. Combos of up to fourteen moves can be achieved, and enemies can be defeated in a wide variety of ways, but this potential is marred by rampant quick time events that interrupt gameplay. While a couple of them are cool, each boss only has a small retinue of scene animations. Since you fight each boss five different times, the cinematic experience can become very dull. Furthermore, these sequences happen far too frequently. There will be moments when you're about to finish off an elaborate combo and the game will suddenly cut into a timed button pressing scene, damaging the continuity of the combat. All of these flaws can easily be overlooked though, as you will likely spend much of your time in Prince of Persia simply admiring the scenery.

The combat is fun, but marred a bit by repetitive quick time events.

The graphical style in Prince of Persia is spectacular. Clothing moves gently with the breeze, and the level design is rarely synthetic. There are the occasional hiccups in the frame rate, and even a few times when Elika will seem to instantly teleport to your location. But there are many more moments that exude natural charm, animate smoothly, and leave you speechless. The contrast between dark and light is especially powerful in this game. Most titles that feature light and darkness as a motif follow a paradigm that has the game starting out bright and cheerful, has evil take over, and ends filled with light once more. Prince of Persia transforms the world from dark to light often, leaving the player in awe at the effects of his/her actions, and it only gets better as time goes on.

Rather than transforming the world and then moving on, Prince of Persia tasks you with important collecting in the renewed worlds. This means that you are spending most of your time in the beautiful, fertile lands, which needs to be experienced to be appreciated. The sound is just about as impressive as the graphics. It does not hold the same "wow" power that the animation does, but it is great in its own subtle way. Playing through the game, one will almost never notice the music because it complements the situation by always playing at the right volume and with the perfect theme. The game's audio is flawlessly employed, and completes the package of beauty that Prince of Persia's presentation is.

It is often said that the purpose of fiction is to create an irresistible dream that will draw the reader into the world of the story and leave him/her never wanting to leave. While Prince of Persia is definitely flawed and can even become tedious at points, it creates a dreamlike world that keeps you interested. It is an interactive extension of what good fiction tries to be, and while it's not for everyone, it can often leave you with a desire to come back for more.