You have to hand it to Ubisoft; with an extremely successful franchise under the belt, and a fanbase fervent enough to spend their dollars on anything with the Prince of Persia printed on the cover, no one would have batted an eyelid if the development team did what most would have in said situation and released a bland HD update of everything they had done previously with the series. The game would have reviewed well, people would have bought it in spades, and everyone would have gone home happy.
But with Prince of Persia Ubisoft have done the exact opposite, rebooting one of their safest franchises with a startling new art direction, unique new game mechanics, and a new approach to level design. Has the risk paid off? In our humble opinion – absolutely. Prince of Persia has flaws, but Ubi’s stark commitment to originality has resulted in a title that will ensure the series relevance for years to come.
Most obviously, the art design in Prince of Persia is simply spectacular. Cel-shaded games tend to have the advantage of sharp, vibrant design but PoP pushes it into the stratosphere, to the extent that it almost reinvents cel-shading. These are not the flat, featureless character models we’re used to with this technique. We could go into how the Prince features more polygonal wankery that almost every AAA game on the market, but that would make the end result (one of the most expressive and striking models we’ve seen to date) redundant in a sense.
What’s far more important, not only with regards to the visuals but how the game plays, is the incredible animation of the Prince. It’s testament to how perfectly each frame is rendered that, no matter how incredible the movements you make in the game are (running along ceilings, pulling off ridiculous wall runs) they seem to ring true and make perfect sense within the game’s universe. Unlike Uncharted, where Nathan Drake’s intricate gymnastics were slightly unbelievable, you never fail to accept the Prince’s efforts, no matter how fantastic they happen to be.
