Warrior Within Review

Ancient Persia did a nice line in highly inefficient, easy on the eyes armour

While there are an impressive amount of attacks which can be chained together, enabling you to alternate between weapons in the left and right hand, it seems likely that most will just mash buttons when surrounded. Lacking the vicious fluidity of Ninja Gaiden, or the sheer style of Devil May Cry, Warrior Within can offer little here except more moves, more enemies, and more blood over the original.

Ah yes, blood, the true sign of grim maturity.

It oozes from every pore; it splatters across the game over screen, flows down the loading one, and gushes from enemies as you decapitate or slice them in half, often in automatically triggered slow-motion. This is gore for gore's sake, seeing as these enemies are sand creatures, just as in the original, and therefore there isn't supposed to be an ounce of blood left in them.

For those who wish to continue picking at the loose threads, the time manipulating mechanic is present, yet for those who valued POP's storyline, it's pretty far from correct. The Prince now has Farrah's medallion, except that medallion never enabled her to manipulate or store the Sands, just to resist their influence.

Like a hastily painted forgery, Warrior Within copies the broadest strokes of the creator's original vision, yet slips up on smaller details

Like a hastily painted forgery, Warrior Within copies the broadest strokes of the creator's original vision, yet slips up on smaller details such as these. Every facet of this title has been targeted at making it a conversation piece between mainstream gamers, from the new identity of the Prince to the enemies he faces. You'll tangle several times with a female adversary who looks like she just stepped off a fetish shoot; breasts barely contained behind a metallic strip which winds round her supple body and terminates in a steel G-string. Finally defeat her and discover with mild dismay that the girl you've just rescued seems to favour low-cut dresses to better display her obvious attributes; there's no escaping the crassness of this design.

Step away from the heaving mammaries and find a selection of enemies who reel off so many wannabe-cool sound bytes, its amazing they ever find time to pick up a sword, let alone swing one. Your fights will be punctuated with 'Hit me harder Prince, harder!', 'I like you in this position', 'he's the one the Empress wants dead!', and your own character's gruff put-downs.

Some of the old magic still remains

The Dahaka itself appears in chase sequences throughout the game, forcing you into sequences which, at best, are fast-paced and exciting, and at worst extended trial and error affairs. Fortunately Ubisoft seem to have realised this, granting the player a restart point with every failed attempt, although their attempts to use the Dahaka at points to generate a sense of acceleration in the story fall flat. Seeing little reward for defeating a boss is one thing, but after that battle, having to suffer through three consecutive Dahaka chases, just to try and impress on the player that the Prince's attempts to thwart the beast have failed, is bad design.

Still, despite all of this, it would be churlish to say that Warrior Within hasn't maintained some measure of what made Prince of Persia great. There are moments of pure platforming delight, particularly within the two towers, before the game seems to lose its way and resort to endless, trap filled corridors. The clockwork tower is a wonder to behold, both in the past and present; you swing and leap from one giant pivot or insignificant cog to the next, marvelling at the fluid, acrobatic control the Prince hands over to you so easily.

The past-present system, while at first seeming like a gimmick designed to rehash levels, does provide some interesting moments. Access a portal to transfer between times and a machine seized in the future will be working perfectly in the past, allowing you to continue further, or a route previously blocked off in the fortresses' golden age will now have opened up due to mold and decay suffered in the present.

Lost in the best moments...it can be easy to forgive Warrior Within's stylistic flaws

Lost in the best moments, almost instinctively guiding the Prince from one rock face to another while the open landscape stretches out before you, it can be easy to forgive Warrior Within's stylistic flaws. This is gaming at its most pure and vicarious; controlling an avatar that pulls off acrobatic moves we can barely conceive of, let alone achieve ourselves, your reactions at the pad rewarded by a ballet of smooth transitions. Snap. You're surrounded by enemies, being pummelled to within an inch of your life, generic rock music kicks in and the mood is shattered in an instant.

This is perhaps Warrior Within's Achilles heel, trying to blend two distinct flavours of gameplay together and, as a result, never excelling in either. Rather than strengthening, supporting one another, the new focus on combat is at direct odds with Warrior Within's more sublime platforming, and vice versa. Witness just how quickly the infuriating, exploding dogs can ruin an otherwise excellent level, drawing frustrated curses where a moment ago there was only wonder.

Creosote was hard to come by on the Island of Time

In trying to appeal to the mainstream, while holding out the occasional olive branch to their faithful, Ubisoft run the risk of satisfying neither. The distinct style of Prince of Persia has been extracted, almost surgically, but in doing so they have unwittingly exaggerated flaws rather than correcting them.

Warrior Within buoys itself up defiantly; it addresses POP's unsatisfying combat by giving you even more of the same, throwing away an intricately developed character and replacing him with an ad hoc stereotype, yet despite these layers of targeted appeal, it cannot disguise or comfortably move away from the true strengths of the series.

It can only weigh them down.