Review by: Willam Abner

Prince of Persia is the ultimate hand holding game. It doesn’t want you to fail. Instead, this is an adventure that the design team clearly wants to see you succeed at completing – to see the ultimate gamer reward of the credits rolling down the TV screen. It’s not that the game is shockingly simple, but rather that it eschews what the franchise is known for: breath-taking acrobatics sprinkled with moments of gamepad flinging frustration. It keeps the thrilling twists, jumps, and wall-runs, but the frustration level is about as low as gaming gets.

The focus is squarely placed on enjoying the gorgeous scenery and marveling at the death defying leaps of the hero – the Prince. Well, he’s actually a tomb robber in search of his lost donkey…a lost donkey carrying a “king’s ransom” in gold. While looking for said donkey during a sandstorm, he stumbles, literally, into Elika, a princess who is fleeing from her father’s guards. This sets in motion the events that lead you and Elika to eventually team up to put a dark god back into his bottle, so to speak.

Elika is more than a pretty face – she’s an integral plot tool and game device. She’s been granted powers by another god and she has the exceptionally handy ability to keep the prince alive at all costs. So if you end up mistiming a jump (and you will) Elika’s magical hand swoops down to save you before you end up as princely road kill. It doesn’t matter the situation — Elika is there to keep you alive. In other words: you can never die. You are not dealt a number of “lives”, there's no need to reverse time (ala Sands of Time), and there’s never a penalty for Elika saving you outside of healing an enemy when in a combat sequence. If you die jumping off a ledge you are simply placed back at the nearest level ground and you try again. Elika also has the ability to launch the prince into what amounts to a double-jump. If he has to make a long leap, the screen turns grey halfway through the jump and this indicates that you need to press the Triangle/Y button to use Elika’s “throw” power so that you can reach the ledge/pole/wall safely. The toughest jump combos in the game require you to use this power so it needs to become second nature.

There are a lot of advantages to this “no death” idea. Aside from the fact that I completed Prince of Persia without as much as one moment of real gaming consternation – those moments when you ask yourself, “Is it really worth finishing this damn thing?” You never have to repeat huge sections of the game over, and over, and over again until you manage to get it right. You can save when you want to as long as you are on a solid ledge and not in the middle of a jump sequence. You do have to repeat small segments until you manage to make the jumps but they aren’t too tough, particularly when compared to other games in the Prince line.