Like an epic mini-series, my battle with Prince of Persia: Warrioir Within is finally coming to an end. After the climactic scene involving a hammer and some violence, consider this review the denouement that sends you home with a feeling of resolution.

I’ll pick up where I left off with my first impressions of the game back in November. Things went from mediocre to hammerlicious shortly after that post. Bottom line: this is a game that was haphazardly cobbled together in order to get it out by Xmas. Aside from the numerous bugs, terrible camera angles, endless back tracking, and bad level design Warrior Within also suffers from a bad story.

The story in Sands of Time was one of the best I’d ever seen in a video game. Warrior starts out good, but about halfway through you get the sense that it’s being padded and extended without good reason. The plot is this: because the Prince opened the sands of time he is being pursued by the Dahaka who is a demon trying to kill him. Your mission is to stop the Empress from making the sands of time so none of this ever happens. That’s great, only after you kill her the sands are still created (they don’t do a good job explaining, but somehow it’s your fault). So then the Prince decides he needs to get the Empress to follow him into the present so he can kill her there and at least stop anyone from finding the sands. This makes no sense after you’ve already killed her in the past, but whatever. The Dahaka is also still chasing you.

Eventually you find out that you can find and use the mask of the wraith to travel through time and re-kill the Empress. Until now you’ve been supposedly using the portals to move between the same points in the past and present, but all of a sudden you are transporting to slightly different points in time without any explaination of how you’re able to do this or where in time you are going. All you’re told is whether you’re in the Past or Present. The mask turns you into a wraith which switches the gameplay up a bit because you’re life continuously empties, but your sands of time regenerate. By this point though, the game is already too long and convoluted. The last third of the story felt like it was being improvised. If you’re getting a headache reading this then you’re a healthy, sane human being.

Hey Ubisoft! We deserve a better story! Spend more than a year developing your titles!

The messed up story paved the way for some messy gameplay. Because you need to travel back and forth in time and undo some of the things you did in the beginning, you are constantly revisiting maps and back-tracking. This is a great device for making a long game in a short amount of time, but not very fun to play. I will admit there were some times when it was cool to revisit the maps. Some of the obstacle courses were interesting to run in the opposite direction while others were slightly different in their past and present incarnations, but overall it felt like you beat Bowser on level 8 in Super Mario Bros and had to run all the way back to the beginning and then had to fight through to level 8 and beat him all over again.

Add this to some confusing level design with save points that point you in the wrong direction after you load your game and you’ve got a recipe for hammer stew.

Hey Ubisoft! We deserve better level design! Spend more than a year developing your titles!

One of the complaints about Sands of Time was the camera. Some of the angles were bad, sometimes the camera would switch right at a tricky jump, and you weren’t able to pan through walls and props. Instead of fixing these issues, Ubisoft took a more interesting approach and made them FAR worse! Half of the time I used my sands to compensate for the bad camera angles.

Try jumping to this column on the first try:

Hey Ubisoft! This camera system sucks dick! Spend more than a year…blah blah blah

Other interesting design quirks include invisible force fields that enemies refuse to cross as depicted below.

These evil pirates would not follow me into the dark room. I could simply take pot shots at them and retreat back without retaliation. I could also throw one of them into the room and fight him solo without the others coming to his rescue. This happens on several occasions.

Finally, as with SoT, Warrior Within has hidden life upgrades throughout the game. In SoT however, you knew right away when you had found one of these upgrades because the sound would change and you would go through a special hallway with blue curtains. In Warrior they make you run obstacle courses in order to obtain the upgrades, but there is no indication whether the course you’re running is heading towards an upgrade or towards your objective. Sometimes I would run a seemingly hidden course thinking I found an upgrade only to hit a cutscene and change of objective. The level design and back-tracking are confusing enough without the extra courses thrown in there with no demarkation. To make matters worse, the only way to get the “good” ending is to find all nine upgrades which allows you to battle the Dahaka.

To synopsize: I do not recommend playing Warrior Within even if you are trapped in a cabin with no other alternatives. Apart from about five hours of frustration free fun, this game fucking blows. The most fun I had was hitting the disc repeatedly with a hammer. Ubisoft should be liable for fraud for putting out a hack job like this, especially when they’ve attached it to a franchise as respected as Prince of Persia. This game could have been amazing if they’d taken the necessary time to do it right. The verdict is still out on whether they’ve redeemed themselves with The Two Thrones, but seeing as Warrior received mostly 80% or higher on most of the game sites, don’t trust anything below 95 out of 100 and wait until you can get it for $15.

Here’s an interesting quote from Ubisoft’s corporate site:

“We keep expectations at the forefront to ensure that our products will never cease to satisfy and amaze.”

Oh, I was definitely amazed…