Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

After Prince of Persia 3D, the '90s franchise could have died and the world would have been grateful. That all changed after the release of The Sands of Time. Since then, PoP has become more of an event then it ever was before and established Ubisoft Montreal as one the most creative and ambitious of the 2000s large-scale developers. Like many other Ubisoft games of recent years, even with The Sand of Time's flaws it stands up as more than a simple game and more as a work of art that had been developed by caring hands and minds that know how to craft an original experience. It was a far cry from the cut-and-paste Tomb Raider mess that was the previous generation's Prince.

From the menu screen to the intro, this is a game that knows how to immerse the player. After an impressive battle siege scenario, the player is eased into the game's pitch-perfect controls and addictive time-bending mechanic. With consistent but evolving environments, SoT is a joy to play from beginning to end with only a few rough patches. The music, setting, and story give the game a storybook like atmosphere that is charming, especially in comparison to its brutish, grim sequel.

The persistent world, an enormous Persian castle, and the vast areas within are both a puzzle you must solve and a obstacle course you need to move through intense platforming. You will often get stuck, but this is rarely due to bad design and has more to do with the player missing a little detail. Only once, in the library section later on in the game, had I ran into a problem that I found to be more of the designers' fault than mine. The game is expertly designed and scaling these challenging environments is a great time. The game has a smooth pace and challenge to it, with each succeeding level getting a bit bigger and more difficult to navigate. There is only one persistent error in the game and that is the combat.

The combat is perfectly acceptable and a bit fun in small doses. It's only the third-section of the game, where Ubisoft unwisely increased the amount of confrontations, that unveils its flaws. Even worse, when you have your time-control abilities taken away from you, the combat system is uneven and frustrating. Along with the awful controls on the swinging ropes, this is a problem that keeps the game from perfection. Even still, the fights, for the most part, give welcome variation between the puzzles and platforming. It's only when the fighting outweighs the rest that its flaws become apparent and hard to forgive.

Between awful advertising (remember that DJ scratch commercial?) and a prior failure in the realm of 3D, The Sands of Time was overlooked in 2003. The platforming, puzzles, and story are still the benchmark of the series. The game, at 6-to-8 hours, compacts the world with unbelievably well-designed levels and natural puzzles that make similar games seem a lot less grand, despite having higher production values. Right beside Tomb Raider and Super Mario 64 [スーパーマリオ64], The Sands of Time is a platformer as timeless as it is influential.