#FF00AA

Playing that one after you’ve played the more recent Warrior Within is a big mistake: while they both mostly sport the same qualities and flaws, the combat system has dramatically changed in the meantime, and Sands of Time fighting is so tedious we ended up giving up around 30% or 40% completion (whereas we had stuck to Warrior Within much longer, despite the damn Dahaka scenes).

Even dismissing the fights, though, doesn’t quite save the game — at least not for 2006. There’s a bit more of a story, but not by much; the character accompanying you is a nice touch, but her AI and combat skills are way too limited (and I can’t believe game developers don’t notice how irritating it is to hear a character cycle though the same three lines of dialogue every five minutes — even in God of War there was some of that); level design is quite monotonous (and I understand it makes sense with the story and the Prince of Persia legacy, and not every game can be as varied as Tomb Raider, but that’s still boring).

Plus, a personal pet peeve of mine: artificial puzzles. There’s a point in the game when you’re going through the menagerie, and one door is closed, and you have to move a block in an animal’s cage to reveal a crack in the wall, through which a sufficiently svelte character can get into the second, door-less cage that houses the switch to open that door you have to go through. Let me repeat: the switch to open a door is inside an animal’s cage that has no doors and that you can only get into through a crack in another cage’s wall. (And, by the way: switches? Glow-in-the-dark, 3x3-foot switches on the floors to open doors in old Persia?) It makes it really, really hard for me to feel any kind of immersion when the level design feels as natural as a sudoku grid. (Tomb Raider makes me feel a bit of the same way, too, with ledges and poles too obviously spaced from one another by the exact jump distance; while God of War twists the issue by having the puzzles explicitly designed by a deus ex machina as a test of valor — Indiana Jones-like.)