Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones Review

A terrific side effect of recently installing a DVD player in my computer is that I now have the ability to burn through my film library while sitting at my desk. I bring this up now because in speaking the language of film, one tends to associate other entertainment mediums with it almost by default. The upside to this is the ability to peg exactly where certain pieces of entertainment pull their influences from which is almost a game in itself. After having completed the Prince of Persia trilogy it occurred to me that the series is the Arabian version of the Indiana Jones saga with a little Back to the Future mixed in.

I have shouted from the tops of mountains of my absolute love for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and of my equally absolute hatred of its sequel Warrior Within. For every step of sheer brilliance the original game made, the sequel took four steps in the direction of stupid then leapt off a cliff for good measure. Warrior Within was so awful in fact that it made me terrified the third game would suck before it was even made.

Fortunately, Ubisoft went back to the original well and pulled up another winner. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones nicely opens with a voice over highlighting the events of the previous game before plunging headfirst into the Prince

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time came out in 2003 and just for kicks I threw it on and played for a while as a comparison to The Two Thrones. There is absolutely no reason that the third game looks as horrible as it does when compared to its predecessor that used the same engine. At the very least, it should either look the same or close to it. So why is The Two Thrones consistently ugly with its characters and environments? It

The vocal performances by Yuri Lowenthal as the Prince and Rick Miller as the Dark Prince are terrific. It

The controls are not as simple as one would hope for The Two Thrones because they remain very much ensconced in the Warrior Within mentality of crossing ancient Arabia with Ninja Gaiden. The result is a slew of options so great in number that it boggles the mind to try and recall them all. Either that or I

When Sands of Time hit it threw a lot of people for a loop because while combat was part of the game, the primary challenge was against the environment. The second game reversed that idea by making combat the focus and throwing in some environment-based puzzles almost as an afterthought. The Two Thrones manages to find a happy middle ground by incorporating the extensive combat options into the environmental puzzles via the Speed Kills. As mentioned in the controls section, the player sneaks up on an opponent, activates the Speed Kill option with the triangle button, then watches for the brief flash of light from the Prince

The Two Thrones is one of those games that makes me wish the PS2 had a multi-disc changer because this combined with Sands of Time would mean several days worth of terrific entertainment. If you haven