Battles of Prince of Persia Review

As someone who’s been playing videogames since the tender age of seven, starting way back in 1984 with the delivery of a 48K Spectrum on Christmas Day, it’s with some dismay that I’ve noticed the increasing trend towards releasing franchise games, rather than titles based on new ideas. Yet occasionally, a franchise will veer off on a tangent and catch you off guard. When the X-Com franchise tackled TIE-Fighter territory with X-Com: Interceptor, the result was a masterful blend of strategic management and space simulation, demonstrating how even an entrenched game series can successfully reinvent itself. Battles of Prince of Persia surprised most people when it turned out that the title was straying from the franchise’s platforming roots, instead trying to carve out a name in Customisable Card Game (CCG) strategy game genre.

The first thing that strikes you is how this is such a bizarre use of the Prince of Persia license. When you think about Prince of Persia, I’m sure “strategy” and “card game” aren’t going to be the first things that leap into your mind. In fact, it’s such a radical departure from the origins of the series that I’m left wondering exactly where the idea came from. I’ve only been able to come up with one conclusion: Battles of Prince of Persia isn’t aimed at existing fans of the series. Though before I get into that, let’s have a look at the actual game.

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of a CCG strategy, it’s reassuringly simple. Unlike a real-time or traditional turn-based strategy, combat is driven by the cards played one after the other by each side, until either both players ‘pass’ to start a new round, or both players run out of cards in their hand that they can play in that particular round. Once a round (or in the case here, an ‘Hour’) is over, each player’s hand is refreshed with new cards, and battle commences again. The key difference between a CCG and a turn-based strategy is that you don’t necessarily get to use all the units in your army in every round. The cards you hold in your hand in each round determine how many units may be used, and also give you the ability to endow your units with stat bonuses (to move an extra four squares per turn, or a +20 bonus to their melee skill, for example), impose penalties on the units of an opposing army, or even allow you to sacrifice a damaged unit to bolster the strength of another one.

It’s at this point where we start to see the fraying around the edges of the game model. Even though there are concessions to realism (being able to flank enemies, giving bonuses according to weapon size, armour ratings, etc) your ability to win battles is far more dependent upon the cards you have in your deck, rather than any tactical ability. If you happen to get a hand that contains a majority of cards that apply buffing effects to your troops, you can be left flat-footed by an opponent whose hand contains cards that can be used to move their units to attack the enemy. It’s down to the luck of the draw to see whether you’re stuck, unable to deploy your troops, when the enemy has more order cards that allow them to tromp over the middle of your formation (or vice versa).

Whilst it may be argued that this is the entire point of a CCG battler, by nature, it places a greater emphasis on sheer luck and your ability to hoard the best cards for your deck than on any ability to tactically plan a battle. As you might expect, this doesn’t make for a great videogame. To make things worse, in terms of presentation, Battles underwhelms to the point of overwhelming with the way it underwhelms. Graphically, the game wouldn’t tax the computing power of an abacus, sound effects are weak and the music is uninspired (and repetitive, to boot). The combat animations to show the progress of inter-unit battles are likewise dull and don’t provide any real sense of involvement. Despite being a DS exclusive, touch screen integration is rudimentary at best and the controls are awkward in general, but having to use the Up key of the D-pad (or if you’re a fellow Southpaw, the X button) in conjunction with the stylus to scroll the map feels needlessly cumbersome.

If there are any positives to take at all, it’s from the Skirmish and Multiplayer modes. These allow you to pick from any of the 24 maps in the Campaign mode and play either against the AI (in Skirmish) or against your friends, even including a hot-seat mode, should you want to play using only a single console. The victory condition can either be to defeat the enemy General, or to vanquish the entire opposing army, the latter of which does allows room for some tactical finesse.

I haven’t mentioned the Campaign mode until this point because, well, it’s the weakest part of the entire game. The campaign shows the Prince playing Patton as he commands the mighty armies of Persia in a series of battles that fill the gap between Sands of Time and Warrior Within in Prince of Persia’s lore. As tenuous franchise links go, it’s more fragile than a Ming Dynasty vase about to topple from its plinth. Since when was the Prince anything other than a lone wolf? A kaftan-wearing, scimitar-wielding James Bond? The whole concept is completely at odds with everything the rest of the Prince of Persia series has shown us up to this point. Why a card battler, of all things? A Mortal Kombat-style beat-’em-up would have been less out of place. If that’s not bad enough, the actual campaign’s ‘story’ is so banal and clichè-ridden it needs fumigating. The pre-battle cutscenes do little to create any sense of mood and are so poorly written you’ll probably just skip them entirely anyway. Even then, the ‘reward’ of playing through increasingly imbalanced conflicts, whilst watching practically unidentifiable units (i.e. squares with dots on) slither around bland maps is enough to make you want to use the game cartridge as a door stop.

There’s little here for anyone barring hardcore CCG-players, certainly not fans of Prince of Persia, who will be wondering why on Earth Ubisoft chose to abandon slick, acrobatic platforming in favour of ugly, lumbering, card-based strategy. Which brings me neatly back to the point I raised at the beginning of the review; reinventing a game franchise can be a risky business, because unless you get it right, it can alienate your existing fan base. X-Com Interceptor is one of the all too rare occasions when a developer got it right, because they didn’t try and change everything that made the series so successful in the first place.

Battles feels more like a marketing exercise than a videogame. It’s as if the over-minds at Ubisoft have identified a demographic that’s been hitherto untouched by the series and tailored a game to try and introduce pre-teen gamers to the franchise in the hope that they’ll be sucked into buying future Prince of Persia platformers a couple of years down the line. Perhaps I’ve gone into cynicism overdrive… Maybe Battles isn’t some kind of insidious recruitment device and it’s simply a bad game. Either way, unless you’re a die-hard fan of the CCG genre, steer well clear.