Amazon.com: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: Playstation 2: Video Games

130 Reviews

5 star:		(71)
4 star:		(34)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

Average Customer Review

4.2 out of 5 stars (130 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't let this one slip through your fingers..., November 14, 2003

By	Clint Emmett - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This game is great! It is one of the best to be released for any system in quite some time. This game will be the standard by which all other action/adventure games will be judged for a long while. It has all the elements of a soaring adventure: action, drama, romance, and treachery.

The developers of this game have really earned their paychecks and put a ton of time into this gem. The Prince has many acrobatic abilities to aid him on his quest to harness the sands of time. He can run on walls, vault over enemies, fight multiple opponents, and control time itself. Death in this game is not the end...simply reverse time and try again.

Speaking of the moves and actions that the Prince can do...awesome!! The combat engine and interface are flawless and jaw droppingly smooth. Facing one opponent, move the analog stick back and press the square button to whip around and give the enemy sneaking up on you a good kick. Trapped by more enemies on all sides, vault over one and get yourself some breathing room. You can freeze enemies with the power of time, you can launch yourself off of wall for a more powerful attack, and you can even get a little help from Farrah, a mysterious woman also spared from the sands of time.

The environments are beautiful and richly detailed. Tapestries move as you walk past, water ripples, and dust falls from the decaying walls of the huge palace that you find yourself trapped in. The palace is quite large and has many areas to explore, nooks and crannies to check out, and a few secret areas.

The game is mosty a straightforward action/adventure quest with a few puzzles thrown in for good measure. Pulling levers, pushing blocks, swinging from walls and dodging traps are all skills that you will find yourself utilizing in dazzling combinations and myriad situations. The game is structured to provide a builing block system when it comes to controlling Prince. Moves are added one on top of another at appropriate times during the game so as to provide a good learning curve...before you know it you will be doing some pretty wild combo moves.

This game is awesome! It is a solid addition to any library and a treat for the eyes as well. This game is as fun to watch as it is to play and everyone should own it. This game is what the "Tomb Raider" series should have been! I simply can't praise it enough! Go buy it and find out for yourself!

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45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Thinking Man's Adventure game, November 29, 2003

By	sporkdude "sporkdude" (San Jose, Ca United States) - See all my reviews

Prince of Persia is just amazing. Prince of Persia is not a hack and slash game, it's not a fighting game, it's not even really a platform game. The best way to describe it is is as a adventure puzzle game, similar to Ico.

Prince of Persia takes place in a huge palace, with many different levels. In fact, there are so many levels, progress is defined by percent, not level number. You control the Prince as he has to traverse the Palace. This palace is magnificent, and the atmosphere of the palace really shines. That alone is worth the price of the game. A lot of thought and artistic integrity was invested in this palace.

The Prince has to go through this palace while fighting monsters, which are pretty easy, while jumping, crawling, swinging, or moving objects his way out. That's the beauty of it. The movements to the next levels are the puzzle. It's worth noting that these puzzles are not random, boring search and try puzzle like in Silent Hill or Kings Quest. It's more of, "how can I get to that wall?", or "how can push that button?". The puzzle take thought, but there never random, off the wall puzzles (like spending hours trying to find a key or some other stuff like that).

Movement itself is a complete joy. Except for wall to wall jumps, movements don't require exact button pushing mechanics or precision timing. If you're on an overhang, and you need to jump to the next ledge, you just press x, and he'll jump and make it if you're aligned correctly. You can jump from wall to wall, jump up, jump down, run along wall, since, balance, crawl, and hang, and much more. If you do make a mistake, you've got the option of rewinding time, which means that you rarely repeat the same level over and over again. This means that the 12 hours to complete this is about 10 hours of real gameplay. Not like other games where 20 hours of gameplay is really just 5 hours extended over a long period of time through repetitive monsters or jumps, backtracking, or repeating levels.

The fights are pretty easy, but they are decent nonetheless. It's good to know that they didn't make it overly hard or pointless.

Somethings did bug me. Sometimes the camera angle is not the best. Sometimes you have to guess whether you can actually make a jump or not, or whether a ledge is there, and that could get annoying. Also, one level in particular near the end is very unintuitive. For some reason they take away your time reversal, they made the level really long, and the end of that level was very unintuitive and clumsy. That five minutes of gameplay took an agonizing hour and a half.

My other gripe are with the cut-scenes. For some idiotic reason, they decided to make the dialogue volume really low and the background noise extremely high, thus making the vocals unintelligible. I couldn't understand half of what was going on. Worst part is - no subtitles. It's extremely terrible since any major game should catch such a bug, and the fix is really easy. I guess they designed it for televisions with high wattage Dolby surround, as opposed to normal televisions.

Pros:
No cheats, guides needed - just thought and common sense
Atmosphere is amazing
Intuitive
Time reverse helps avoid repetition
Great flow
Good balance
Immense palace

Cons:
Some moves are clumsy - wall to wall jumps for example
Vocals in cut-scenes are way too soft

Difficulty - Easy

Frustration Level - Low

Time to Complete: 12 hours

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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It certainly doesn't suck., November 21, 2003

By	P. Lee "impulse shopper" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Most video games these days seem all new-fangled and complicated to my 20-year-old self, but I'm into this. The puzzles are tricky without being frustrating, the graphics are rather gorgeous, and my friend Krista says the prince is hot. I think he's a little polygonal-looking, but I guess men with jagged edges need love, too. There are enough elements preserved from the original game to keep the title from being pointless cash-in-ism, but this new game won't have you mistaking your Playstation for an old-school Apple, either.

I guess the only problem is the combat. You kill a zombie. Then another one. Then another one. It takes only a few seconds, but the process is repeated until you're praying for sweet, sweet oblivion. The first few battles aren't so bad, but each is more challenging than the last (and by "challenging," I mean "interminable").

On top of that, you have to keep the zombies from braining your requisite sassy love interest, but I'm not really sure why, since her only function in the game seems to be to make Disney-style repart�e and somtimes accidentally shoot you.

I also have a slight problem with the hero. He is headstrong and disobedient, often turning around and performing elaborate lunges to target a zombie that, unlike the one right in front of him, poses no immediate threat. I suspect that he does this because he resents my position of control, so sometimes I put the controller down and let the zombies have their way with him. It's very satisfying.

The positive aspects of the game are well worth sitting through a few awkward, over-long battle sequences, though. I could watch the prince run up and down the walls until my eyeballs fall out, the puzzles straddle the line between ridiculously easy and frustratingly hard very well, and I suppose you can decide for yourself just how hot the prince is.