Dear Reader:
GoNintendo 'End of day' thought - Cort's Prince of Persia: The Fallen King (DS) review
Cort’s back with another piece of editorial bliss. This time, he presents you with a review for Prince of Persia: The Fallen King on DS. I haven’t even had a chance to crack open my copy yet! Good thing that guy is on the ball. While you’re enjoying that review, I am going to sneak off to bed. I’ll see you all in just a few, short hours. Happy Monday morning/MLK Day to all! —RMC
The last few months for me have been crazy: travelling to Japan, relocating from the arctic wasteland of Minneapolis to the very palatable San Francisco, attending various gaming media events and receiving a ton of hands-on opportunities or review copies of games which I’m only now getting caught up on their write-ups. One of those copies that arrived (to my old address 2k miles away the day after moving into my new one) was the new Prince of Persia game for DS, courtesy of Ubisoft.
I’ll be honest, aside from the very old school original PoP game, my exposure to the series reboot has been limited to indirect experiences through screenshots, videos and editorial coverage. But I’ve always been interested to give them a whirl, and having one arrive at my doorstep gave me no further excuses to start.
Magicians are all business.
The Fallen King is a companion to the most recent console releases, and really consists of two things: story and platforming. Again, I haven’t played the console counterparts, but the story and characters clearly overlap. However, the art style and game play are unique to the DS outing, foregoing the full 3D action and cel-shaded anime look of the consoles for a younger, almost bobble-headed “3D on a 2D plane” (2.75D?) sidescroller, and traditional button-pressing for exclusive stylus scribbling. In some ways, it’s a combination of New Super Mario Bros visually with Phantom Hourglass controls set to the PoP universe.
The basic premise of the story without spoiling anything is that evil has corrupted the kingdom, a powerful enemy is responsible, and it’s your job to restore peace and order by collecting pieces of a magical seal and vanquishing the monsters responsible for the world’s turmoil.
So having introduced the graphic style and gameplay, how does it come together? Visually, it’s decent. Not beautiful, not pressing any boundaries of the technology. It lacks some of the detail possible with 2D sprites, but what is gained is a lot of animation that would be unexpected from flat art. Much of the dialogue (RPG-like text overlays and full screen art slides) are 2D paintings which do look much better than the 3D components. I did notice a fair amount of artifacts and strange clipping of 3D planes from time to time, and the framerate suffers considerably if more than 2 enemies are on screen at once; a huge detriment to the precision of platforming.
Speaking of gameplay, eschewing predictable, button presses for stylus-only generally works, but from time to time, it fails entirely. In the course of reaching the 100% completion mark, I can count FOUR occasions where the controls were responsible for what some might consider “game-breaking” bugs, that only after about 2-3 dozen tries did things actually work, apparently by accident. All of them revolve around floating/moving platforms, and instead of jumping to safety, Princie-poo decided to run directly off to his doom. Wholly frustrating to say the least.
Pressing the “any” button.
To be fair, there is one button used in the game, the “any” button, which initiates your various magic spells in conjunction with a stylus motion. The rest of the controls seemed something like a long day at the office, double-clicking my way through an infinite loop of folders on my desktop. Since most of the controls resort to simple tapping somewhere on the screen, it’s no wonder the moves execute incorrectly sometimes. Amid all that tapping you’re bound to accidentally dismiss a helpful pop-up of information regarding play mechanics, as happened to me numerous times. Without reading the entire manual to find it nestled at the very end, I would have never known about a defensive position to block enemy attacks; something that killed me many, many times early on in the game thinking my only recourse to enemies was to avoid them — difficult when you’re often blocked into a small deathmatch arena by forcefield.
Despite the questionable controls, the platforming itself is pretty satisfying, with a variety of level designs that gradually increase in diversity and difficulty. Some rudimentary puzzles are peppered throughout, but most adults will have no trouble, and I suspect many younger players won’t either. All levels, and indeed the story are completely linear, which some may argue creates a better platforming experience, so take that for what it’s worth to you. Far and away the best levels come in the last world, where “portals” are introduced, adding a clever layer of frosting to things.
Part of the quest involves collecting coins and hidden (or difficult to reach) treasure chests, mainly to purchase your way past locked gates to collect additional life bubbles or peculiar orbs whose purpose I have yet to figure out. Save points are generously scattered throughout the levels, so you may not even need to bother with expanding your health meter. A perfectly sound tactic could be to intentionally die if your health is low, as your last save point is likely nearby, and you are fully charged when you re-spawn.
I have no reason to believe my copy of the game is different from retail or is a debug version, but on the health note: I couldn’t lose during boss fights. They would attack, I would lose health, but once it reached zero, I would sort of die… and by that I mean reappear with full health while the boss would retain any damage done. This might sound easier than it really is, since most of the boss fights required unclear techniques to win, with no real indication of how to triumph. Ashamedly, I did peruse a messageboard or two seeking hints after wasting an hour with useless attempts, only to find I wasn’t the only one in a haze about things.
All said and done, my play time (collecting 100%) ran between 10-15 hours, including a fair amount of story reading between action scenes. Unfortunately all that story leads to a short and rather anti-climactic ending, and if you missed collecting anything in previous worlds, you’re out of luck; you can only play the most current world, so replay value is debatable.
Anyway, beyond the nitpicking, the game is a fun and passable platformer that is likely suited to younger players both in terms of difficulty and character design, especially when compared to its more widely-appealing console counterparts. It was actually hard for me to put down knowing one more quick level wouldn’t hurt anyone. It won’t replace your NSMB or Z:PH, but is a relatively engaging substitute for fans of Prince of Persia as a series or pick up and play junkies like me. –cortjezter