Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time IGN review

[Living-In-Clip]

Originally posted by MPTheory
I hope your thumbs fall off!

They would if I had something to play!

I am trying to conserve some money and undecided on what to buy.

(1) I-Ninja

It looks like my style. A nice platformer that doesn\'t take itself serious. Getting decent reviews.

(2) Prince of Persia

Looks stunning. Getting rave reviews, but not sure it\'s my style.

(3) Legay of Kain: Defiance.
Hated all the other installments, but from reviews they say all the problems I had have been addressed (combat system / camera) . I just dig the vampire  / demon storyline.

I loved Soul Reaver. Don\'t care much for the others... Defiance supposedly is more like Soul Reaver so I might actually buy this one.

I rented it about a week ago and at first I was a little disappointed.  The fighting is pretty cool at first, but the slow-mo over the top matrixish moves get old quick.. as well as running on the walls (you have to do it all the time).  It is truly fun however to navigate the huge jungle gym-like poles and swinging around and jumping from wall to wall.  

Something also pretty neat is the abiltiy to rewind time.  Once you gain a certain item in the game and it\'s charged up with sand you can rewind time (about 10 seconds worth) as many times as you have orbs filled on your bar.  It lets you try things you normally wouldn\'t try, cause you know if you fall to your death.. you can always just rewind and continue on.  

I also didn\'t like how much it guides you along and tells you what to do and where to go.  I only played it for about 3 hours, but from what I saw i\'d give it an 8.5 out of 10.

Awesome game. My only gripe is that it was too short.

I don\'t really see the problem MP had with the sound. It gets frustrating in some areas because you don\'t know what to do. Still, they have a pretty cool feature where you\'ll recieve a vision at a savepoint that gives little clues as to what you are supposed to do in the next section.

Overall, I would say it is a VERY solid game. Probably the best game I have played in the past couple of months. I would recommend renting first though. It might be a little too frustrating for some people tastes.

I sometimes wish there were replays for some of the acrobatic maneuvers you have to pull off. I remember "tightrope" walking along a narrow walkway and then jumping off the walkway onto the wall and wall jumping onto a flagpole and then doing gymnastic swings to get momentum to flip off the poll on to a vertical column and jumping from that column to another and another and then jumping off that onto another wall and wall running to another platform where I had to run up the wall to reach the ledge so I could climb up and whoop 20+ sand zombies.

BTW, The unlockable PoP sucks. It is the same game but the emulation runs WAY too slow. It makes the game nowhere near as fun as the original.

I\'ll have to second that notion that the emulated POP1 kinda sucks. Nice and sharp graphically, but slow. Slower than the slow PC version. Also, after playing POP4, I\'ve found the play control of POP1 to be extremely difficult to get used to. I love side-scrollers like this.. but POP1 is.. well.. let\'s just say that I wish it was easier to tip-toe.

Tapping left/right only to plummet to my doom is frustrating.

Wow. That\'s all I have to say.
When I first saw screens and movies of this I wasn\'t all that impressed. Then when the game started getting rave reviews I was pleasantly surprised to see that my fears about the game had been unnecessary.

Yesterday I got some money and I decided it was time for a new game as I\'d been clean for far too long. Out I went, wallet in my pocket, with intentions of buying Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3.
When I got to the store the cover of PoP caught my eye. Now I had a dilemma. Either SMA4, a game I knew was really, really, really good and would last a while even after I had finished it, or Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a game I had read in various reviews was really, really, really good, but didn\'t last very long. I would have bought both, but I needed some money to buy Christmas presents.
After a long time thinking, taking countless trips from the GBA shelves to the PS2 shelves, and back, looking at the covers, reading the back of the covers, and just thinking, I reached a decision. Prince of Persia was the choice, and I don\'t regret it.

Combat is really fun (especially jumping over enemies and then striking at them) and the acrobatics are perhaps even more fun than the combat. Too bad about the puzzles being poo and the game lasting so short.