Prince of Persia Revelations
Revel in its complete crappiness.
Published: January 31, 2006
The PSP for all the bells and whistles that it sports is really much closer to an original PlayStation than a PS2. Sure it can do most of the tricks that the PS2 can in terms of making things look pretty, but the horsepower -- especially when it's capped at 200MHz -- isn't nearly enough to do a straight port of a PS2 game. X-Men Legends II showed it and now Revelations certainly proves it.
That's not even getting into what a completely retarded idea it was to port the worst game in the series to the PSP and in such broken shape. It's been said plenty of times that a far, far better choice would have been The Sands of Time, a far simpler and much, much better game that could have made the hop more easily.
But no, Ubisoft inexplicably decided it would be wiser to go with a game that was poo-pooed by critics, and managed to actually hamper the experience more with some serious technical problems, serious crash bugs and didn't bother to fix any of the problems from the original game in the process. But hey, we get 20 new bits that you can't skip over and often have to backtrack through!
The storyline sets things up so well too: the Prince's escape from fate, living when he should have died thanks to the time reversal powers of the Dagger of Time, has unwittingly set upon himself the Dahaka, a creature consumed with setting the timeline right by simply removing the Prince from it, thus restoring the natural order of fate. For years it has hunted the Prince, leaving him without sleep or food for massive stretches of time as he's run incessantly from the creature.
His travels have finally led him to the Island of Time, where the Sands themselves are made. The Prince reckons preventing the Sands from ever being made will fix everything, and leave him finally at peace. Somehow, though, as the Prince turned darker and harder, the rest of the game did as well. The result is a sequel that lost that delicate balance of platforming and combat, of brilliant level design and flawless presentation, replaced now by too much combat that tries too hard to show off the dual-weapon free-form combat system that Ubisoft's Montreal team cooked up.
Like the storyline, the concept of using two weapons and the environment to build-a-combo as you see fit is brilliant, but the execution is hampered by enemies that are often too tough, too numerous and too frequent to give the game any sort of rhythm. Barely half an hour into the game, you're forced to fight a mini-boss that can kill you in two combos, while it'll take you upwards of a couple dozen to finally finish her off -- that is if you haven't ripped the game out of your PSP and chucked it across the room.
The bottom line, and this is before we get into the technical problems that the PSP presents, is that the game quite literally breaks everything that was good about the first one. If The Two Thrones hadn't come along and miraculously saved the series, I would have though this one hell of a way to kill a franchise off. Most people bitched about the combat in the first game (I personally thought the powers in it made it quite enjoyable), so why add more of it for the second? The platforming, the running along walls and making massive flips, that was the stuff that made the game fun, and here, it's just not as imaginative or interesting.
That's not even getting into what a completely retarded idea it was to port the worst game in the series to the PSP and in such broken shape. It's been said plenty of times that a far, far better choice would have been The Sands of Time, a far simpler and much, much better game that could have made the hop more easily.
But no, Ubisoft inexplicably decided it would be wiser to go with a game that was poo-pooed by critics, and managed to actually hamper the experience more with some serious technical problems, serious crash bugs and didn't bother to fix any of the problems from the original game in the process. But hey, we get 20 new bits that you can't skip over and often have to backtrack through!
The storyline sets things up so well too: the Prince's escape from fate, living when he should have died thanks to the time reversal powers of the Dagger of Time, has unwittingly set upon himself the Dahaka, a creature consumed with setting the timeline right by simply removing the Prince from it, thus restoring the natural order of fate. For years it has hunted the Prince, leaving him without sleep or food for massive stretches of time as he's run incessantly from the creature.
His travels have finally led him to the Island of Time, where the Sands themselves are made. The Prince reckons preventing the Sands from ever being made will fix everything, and leave him finally at peace. Somehow, though, as the Prince turned darker and harder, the rest of the game did as well. The result is a sequel that lost that delicate balance of platforming and combat, of brilliant level design and flawless presentation, replaced now by too much combat that tries too hard to show off the dual-weapon free-form combat system that Ubisoft's Montreal team cooked up.
Like the storyline, the concept of using two weapons and the environment to build-a-combo as you see fit is brilliant, but the execution is hampered by enemies that are often too tough, too numerous and too frequent to give the game any sort of rhythm. Barely half an hour into the game, you're forced to fight a mini-boss that can kill you in two combos, while it'll take you upwards of a couple dozen to finally finish her off -- that is if you haven't ripped the game out of your PSP and chucked it across the room.
The bottom line, and this is before we get into the technical problems that the PSP presents, is that the game quite literally breaks everything that was good about the first one. If The Two Thrones hadn't come along and miraculously saved the series, I would have though this one hell of a way to kill a franchise off. Most people bitched about the combat in the first game (I personally thought the powers in it made it quite enjoyable), so why add more of it for the second? The platforming, the running along walls and making massive flips, that was the stuff that made the game fun, and here, it's just not as imaginative or interesting.
