Prince of Persia

Ubi sands down some old moves - is the Prince fresh again?

	Version 360, (PS3, PC)	Developer Ubisoft Montreal	Publisher Ubisoft	Genre Adventure

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Elika's magical abilities, context-sensitively mapped to Y, open up new means of exploration. The most frequently used of these is the teleport double-jump: the game helpfully indicates when you'll need to employ it by bleaching the surroundings of colour as you leap. By collecting "light seeds" scattered across purified areas, Elika can power up her mojo to take advantage of magical glyphs embedded at key points in the landscape. There are four types of glyph, with the simplest warping the pair from one glyph to another, while the demented green varieties send the Prince charging up vertical surfaces in a well-disguised homage to the on-rails shooter.

While the latter activity can be quite challenging, Prince of Persia is on the whole a very forgiving game - perhaps to its detriment. Enthralling though the duo appear in action, navigating the environments takes on an almost somnambulatory feel after a while, as plump windows of input slide under your finger tips like tubes of toilet paper on a supermarket conveyer belt. Not being able to fall to your death (aka "the Croft plunge") is a bit of contributory factor in this regard: Elika will quietly warp the Prince back to solid ground if he does anything foolhardy. As intriguing as the formula "you can't die" may seem, in the end it's just a flash term for some very big-hearted check-pointing, and while Prince of Persia is a more accessible game as a result, it's also not a massively exciting one.

You can't die in combat either, though the difficulty factor is a bit more uneven. Prince of Persia's answer to the messy swordfights of its predecessors is to narrow the focus, limiting the opposition almost entirely to four boss monsters - one per district - with the player routing each one zone by zone before scuffing them out of existence in a climatic encounter. The bosses all have their own back stories and signature attributes - the Hunter is a grisly, leopard-like hunchback with scissors where his right hand should be, while the Warrior was once a human king who sold his soul to Ahriman in exchange for a physique more befitting Ben Nevis.

Hammering the sword button till it disintegrates won't get you far here - even the most sluggish of Ahriman's minions will punish sloppy swordsmanship with rapid counterattacks - and while Elika will again warp the Prince to safety if he goes down for the count, your adversary regains health every time she does so. Chaining together her offensive spells, the Prince's gauntlet lifts, aerial assaults and basic blows is the order of the day, as is learning your foe's traits back-to-front, and nailing the timing of the Heavenly Sword-esque QTEs the game doles out at intervals.

Once you've got this approach down cold, however, Prince of Persia grows a little too easy once again. While the aforementioned QTEs grow increasingly stringent with successive encounters, the combo windows remain accommodating, and there's a startling reliance on rickety old boss conventions such as luring the poor sod near a cliff edge in order to boot him off. It's still great fun, and the developer's mastery of dramatic camera angles, the colourful organic disorder of the enemy models, the Prince's cocksure poise and Elika's more cautious deportment, will keep you plugging away despite the shortfalls.

Prince of Persia is magnificent, but there's a nagging sense that the bulk of the innovations here are slightly too little, somewhat too late. Beneath the Zelda-esque branching world and glowing cell-shaded visuals, the game's genetic code is largely that of Sands of Time, the undeniable high point of the series, whose perfect harmony of move-set and level design Ubisoft Montreal has continually tried, and failed, to surpass. The Xbox 360 game rekindles that glory, without a doubt, but it doesn't take the franchise anywhere drastically new -nowhere new enough, certainly, to justify the leap to current generation hardware - and while it's easy to pick up, it's also rather easy to master. These qualms don't make Prince of Persia anything less than the best action adventure title we're likely to encounter this month, but paradoxically enough, they do make it one of the more disappointing. At least the Prince and Elika turned out likable enough in the end.

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