Design Review: Prince of Persia Classic

About the Game
Prince of Persia Classic is a total re-imagining of the classic 8-bit platformer, Prince of Persia. Following the success of Ubisoft's 2003 third-person action title Sands of Time and its 2005 sequel, The Two Thrones, the franchise has been redefined in popular consciousness as an action-heavy epic, centering around its cunning, acrobatic protagonist: the Prince. In his previous two outings (let's forget Warrior Within), the Prince was revealed to be a complex character whose psyche is divided between the intrepid hero we all know and love and his darker, more sinister half. Prince of Persia Classic borrows its art design from these more recent entries, but the story and gameplay remain true to its arcade platform roots.

Introduction
The game begins with a short cutscene to explain the situation: the Vizier has designs on the Princess, so he sets up an hourglass which allows her exactly one hour to choose between execution and marriage. Meanwhile, the Prince has been imprisoned, and must escape the dungeons in order to rescue the Princess. Taking control of the Prince, you must navigate your way through dozens of deadly traps, jumping puzzles, and sword-fights, all within the established time limit.

The controls are deceptively simple. Movement requires no button-mashing; a few nudges of the thumbstick translate into small steps, jumping rolls, backflips, and ledge-grappling leaps of faith. Traps often require you to gauge the distance of your jumps, as do the various switches which open and close gated doorways. Each level has an obvious exit which must be unlocked by pressing a switch, usually located in a very difficult-to-reach area. Traps include ground-spikes and guillotine-gates, both of which are deadly and difficult to avoid. If the Prince dies, you will lose a bit of time from the clock and start over from the beginning of the level or the last checkpoint.

Combat requires only two buttons - attack and parry. Enemies will parry the majority of your attacks, unless you catch them off-balance with a counter-attack. It is possible to sword-lock with an enemy, in which case you must rapidly press the attack button to prevail. Alternately, you will occasionally cross blades with your opponent and exchange places with them. You can sheathe your sword once you've engaged an enemy, but it is usually impossible to avoid a sword fight once it's begun. Consequently, most of the combat in the game is inescapable.

What Works
Visually, the game is quite striking, appearing much like previous Ubisoft Prince titles in palette and texture. The backdrops and ambient lighting are significantly more detailed than you'd expect for a $10 Xbox Live purchase, and although it probably won't cause any jaws to drop, the variety is enough to keep the game appealing for the few hours it will take to play it through. The character animation is great, for the most part, though combat can appear jerky for reasons I'll explain later.

The level design is generally very challenging; perhaps overly so, in parts. The game will force you to take measured steps to avoid being instantly killed by traps, while placing harsh time constraints on you in the form of slowly closing gates. The difficulty is what you'd expect from a game with this legacy, and the designers did a great job of using just a few basic tricks and traps to build a lot of interesting, head-scratching scenarios.

Thankfully, the punishing one-hour time limit won't technically prevent you from completing the game - once your time is up, a short cutscene will play indicating that the wedding is about to start, but then you will be free to continue, albeit less a few Live Achievements.

What Doesn't Work
Combat.
Combat is an absolute mess. The attack/parry sword-fighting system sounds great in theory - after all, it worked wonderfully in Sid Meier's Pirates! But in Prince of Persia Classic, it's as if they couldn't decide whether the combat should be a mini-game or a straightforward action affair. For whatever reason, the attack and parry buttons don't translate to immediate results on-screen; they queue up commands to be executed in order (without any UI feedback as to what that order may be). This would be fine if enemies weren't capable of changing their commands mid-swing, deftly switching from parry to attack while the Prince clumsily executes his action queue, ignoring your input.

After a while, it becomes obvious that you must press one button at a time, to prevent from queuing up actions, and pray that your input registers in time to follow the action on screen. Sometimes you will enter into a pretty exciting exchange with an enemy - attack, parry, counter-attack, parry, counter-attack, parry, etc. In such cases, the game should reward the player for exercising fast reflexes, but in fact, these exchanges always end with the enemy switching actions mid-swing and breaking your parry for a successful hit. Feinting after a counter-attack is not possible for the player, so why should it be possible for enemies?

On the whole, sword-fighting is extremely inconsistent, and it appears to be more dependent on luck than skill. The control problems are compounded by the fact that pretty much every enemy you face enjoys twice the amount of health as you, and even worse, enemies never behave the way their animations indicate they should. For example, one of the enemies is a lumbering giant who wields an enormous mace. His attack animations are slow and cumbersome - he'll often raise the mace over his head and smash it down in front of you, followed by a lengthy recovery animation. In any other game, this would present an opportunity for the nimble Prince to deftly leap in for a quick strike against a much slower opponent. But when you attempt any such counter-attack, the giant will jerkily break off his attack recovery animation and instantaneously smack you in the face. Why go through such pains to give the impression that this enemy is slow, when he is in fact Sonic the freaking Hedgehog in disguise?

Controls.
Sands of Time established a new precedent for third-person action games, offering unbelievably tight controls that allowed for artful acrobatics or jaw-dropping special attacks with just a few flicks of the wrist. It's obvious that the developers were hoping to achieve the same with Prince of Persia Classic, given just how many different context-sensitive commands are mapped to the analog stick. But the Prince moves too fluidly - he's got slippery shoe syndrome.

It's very frustrating when you've just completed several consecutive, perfectly-timed jumps, only to front-flip off a sheer cliff to your doom - merely because you moved the analog stick 1mm too far to the left. A simple game warrants simple controls. The A button already makes the Prince jump and roll, so why map it to the analog stick? This is redundant, and I find it hard to believe that many players would find it useful.

Puzzles.
I will hand it to the level designers - the game presents some great challenges in the form of switches, locked gates, and traps. But a few of the puzzles in the game stand out as unreasonable and unforgiving. For instance, one encounter requires that you sheathe your sword and run headlong into the enemy, but the game provides no clue that this is an option. At another point, you're forced to jump blindly over a cliff to cause a magical floor to appear - this is in a game that severely punishes leaps of faith.

Even more unreasonable is the game's tendency to string a number of difficult puzzles together, without giving the player the relief of a checkpoint. This puts unnecessary strain on the player, because if you repeatedly fail the third in a string of puzzles, you're forced to take your chances with the first two puzzles all over again every single time. This gets old very quickly.

Fix this Game in Three Steps
So how can this game's design do justice to its production values?
Read on!

1. Restructure the Combat- Redesign sword-fighting as a mini-game, ala Sid Meier's Pirates! Preserve the tactical nature of combat by allowing high/middle/low attacks and parries. Reward quick responses with an opportunity for acrobatics and counter-attacks. Tighten up enemy animations so they won't give the player the wrong impression about which action is coming next.


2. Fix the Controls - Remove the ability to jump and roll from the analog stick, preserving it for simple movement only. Separate the roll command from the jump button, so the two actions won't be confused. Reserve the R-Trigger button for grabbing ledges, ala Shadow of the Colossus, so that climbing up and down from platforms feels a bit more natural.


3. Rethink the Puzzles - Before implementing a puzzle, ask yourself how the player can determine the solution without resorting to trial and error. Add more frequent checkpoints to compensate for areas with tricky, consecutive puzzles. Avoid adding superfluous gates and triggers which only serve to confuse the player.

Conclusion
Despite its flaws, Prince of Persia Classic is worth playing if you can muster up the patience for it. From a design perspective, it could use some fixing up, but its a refreshing change to see a platformer return to the roots of the genre. Of course, if nothing else, the past fifteen years have taught us that games should present a challenge without being too punishing. Prince of Persia Classic demonstrates an awareness of this principle, but it nevertheless clings to some of the ideas that made the original platformers so needlessly frustrating.