Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
After the triumphal procession of the permanent tomb of Lara to. In terms of personnel and prefixes of all stripes, it seemed that the stock of ideas in the genre of adventure 3D explosions, if not washed to the bottom, then at least already close to completion. I repent, I also adhered to this point of view. And even respected Ubisoft Montreal Studio , which pleased us with hit Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell And Rainbow Six 3 , With all his desire, I could not believe the word. However, the way out The Sands of Time I set up everything in its places: almost all the promises of the developers turned out to be true, the optimists with joyful cries ran to sweep out the wheels with the new hit from the shelves, and the shameful skeptics came silent … Well, I, refreshing the whole set of laudatory epithets, sat down to write this review.
The main thing is to have time to kill the enemy with a dagger, otherwise the murdered adversary will not jump to his feet and rush into battle.
Welcome to our sandbox! The plot of the new Prince of Persia transfers us to the ancient Eastern era, the undoubted charm and color of which the scriptwriters for the fullness of taste seasoned with ancient Eastern mysticism. During the assault on the enemy palace, the Sultan Persia sends his son for the legendary treasure – a magical dagger. Having reached priceless prey and miraculously avoiding the death of numerous defenders of the fortress, the prince fulfills the task of his father. It would seem that there is an end to the fairy tale: the defeated and robbed badges re -rebuild the palace and swore allegiance to the Sultan of Persia, the winners with a bunch of trophy jewelry and beauties diverge home, and the prince boasts of his dagger in front of the high -born guests, cuts the sausage and pushes off the pieces of the halvae … It was not there! Sweet and vile vizier (in fairy tales of viziri are always evil), it turns out, for a long time he met the throne, secretly studied magical Talmudes and developed an insidious plan to seize power. According to the insidious old man-Astmatik, a naive and gullible prince uses a dagger and opens access to another ancient treasure-a huge sand clock, which, at first glance, are not filled with anything, but golden sand. But in fact, inside the clock is the magical sand of the time, which from the prince’s light hand crumbles around the district and in the blink of an eye turns almost all the inhabitants of the palace and its environs into evil sand monsters. The normal “homo sapiens” among this sand zoo remains only three: the prince (he is also the main character of the game and our alter ego concurrently); Vizier (he is also the main villain and the very first candidate for flawing fair retaliation from the head hero) and the beautiful girl Farah (she is also an assistant to the prince and a good gift for puberty players who were already going to outraged: “And where is Lara with her pleasing eyes with roundings?!"). The only chance to stop this sandy apocalypse and restore the status quo is to return the sand clock carried away by monsters and sharpen the sand of the time in them again. By irony of fate, this task can only be fulfilled with the help of the same dagger, which caused all the troubles.
Jump over a zombie https://kingpalacecasino.co.uk/withdrawal/ and cut his neck with a jatagan? For the prince this is one of the simplest tricks.
By the way, in Prince of Persia, not so much the plot itself is interesting as the way to serve it a la Max Payne -In fact, we are the audience and participants in the memoirs of the protagonist: the passage of episodes alternates with excellent videos on the engine, in key places of history the voice of the prince is commenting on what is happening, while maintaining the game, says: “Next time I will continue the story from this place,” and during the player’s mistakes that lead to death, he inserts something like “no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! Everything was not at all like!". All these are trifles, but they are very well complemented by the game and give it an unforgettable atmosphere of an oriental fairy tale. Ballad of the Persian spiderman Adventure games with an arcade slope almost always left me indifferent. There is a very simple explanation for this – I hate stupid jumps and other entertaining gymnastics. But the “prince” is not just an pleasant exception to the dull sleepyard of the action of the action, in which the kutsy gameplay is stretched for long hours in the most cattle way-dozens and hundreds of attempts to jump over the same ravines with interruptions on Save/Load. The excellent implementation of acrobatics in the new “prince” not only leaves far behind both existing, and even only preparing competitors, but also makes air gymnastics the most exciting and beautiful component of all gameplay. This can be partly explained by the magnificent animation of the protagonist – it seems that the developers, as promised, studied the best films with eastern martial arts for a very long time. This is noticeable not only during combat scenes, but also in “peaceful” episodes in which hundreds of different obstacles have to be overcome in order to get to the deployment point. Jumping through the abyss, running along the walls, walking over the abyss along narrow beams and logs, breathtaking tricks on ropes and crossbars, deadly acrobatic numbers on the cornice wide in the palm of the palm of the palm – all this looks not only graceful and beautiful, but also reliably. With your mind, of course, you understand that a normal person simply cannot do it physically
Running along the walls, despite the obvious conflict with the basics of physics and common sense, is implemented very believable.
This, but the eyes convince the opposite – it is just right to supply boxes with the game with a warning inscription “Do not try to repeat what you saw at home”. A significant point is a good animation of not only individual movements, but also of various transitional phases, as a result of which the joints between individual movements are completely invisible. And there are a lot of combinations of various movements in the game: jumping “ladder” on two opposite walls, jumping from one crossbar to another, jumping from a column to a column … And how do you, for example, such an acrobatic combo: run a few meters over the wall over the abyss; Without stopping running, cigarette aside; grab the rope, swing on it, jump from a rope to the wall to press a button that opens the door; Immediately jump away from the wall and have time to grab the elusive rope, and then, at the counter, once again jump off the rope and slip into a rapidly closing passage?! Or, perhaps, you like a jump under the ceiling of a huge cave from stalactite to stalactite, which under your body weight fall down a few seconds after you have time to grab them,? As soon as you master a new combination of tricks and techniques, and your inner voice says “everything is worthy of the task to them more”, a new episode immediately begins at a new portion of dental acrobatics, and interest in the game flares up with renewed vigor. But the main plus, in my opinion, lies in the simple and favorable to the mistakes of the player management. You did not notice the cliff under your feet and stepped straight into the abyss? It doesn’t matter – the prince independently recoil from the edge of the abyss, with his hands with his hands to restore balance. Did not calculate the moment of jump and fell down? Torment – the main character will have time to grab the edge and hang over the abyss in his arms. This is not all; The game forgives more serious mistakes. Firstly, the magical dagger, with which the prince does not part for a minute, has the ability to turn the course of time back, which can be used in the case of the fatal ending of the next gymnastic. But for “rewinding” time back, one portion of magic sand of the time is consumed with which the dagger charges when battle with enemies. Accordingly, there are situations when the dagger is empty – and turn the time back
Even the puzzles with the turning of the levers, the developers managed to make it interesting and diverse.
impossible. However, even in this case, the player is given the opportunity to correct the situation by continuing the game from the nearest episode. And this I had not yet said a word about the points of conservation generously placed in levels after each battle with enemies and passing the most difficult “gymnastic” stages. In a word, the balance between the complexity and interestingness in The Sands of Time is almost perfect – not a single stage in the game is never too simple to lose interest in it, and at the same time it never turns out to be too complicated and abandon the game. Stroke the immortal vs of the immortal The second main component of The Sands of Time gameplay is the battle with the sandy “zombies”. Visually, the battles look no worse (if not better) than acrobatics. But the very implementation of Sich with monsters sins a number of shortcomings. Firstly, all opponents are impenetrable stupid: while one of them attacks you, the rest for the most part stupidly dance nearby, patiently waiting for their portion of blows and attacks. But these are still flowers, the most serious problems are that both the player and monsters are theoretically immortal. It is possible to finally get rid of the already killed hostiles only by sucking the sand of time from it with the help of the same magical dagger – otherwise the zombie will lie down a little for decency, jumping up to his feet and again rushing into battle. In contrast to such a disgrace, the player, as already mentioned above, has the opportunity to unwind time back, and every enemy killed and “pumped” into a dagger is equivalent to one charge of the sand of time and, accordingly, another opportunity to twist the wheel of time back. You imagine this wonderful process? You were killed – you rolled back, did not have time to “suck” the monster into the dagger – he comes to life. As a result, even a fight with five serious opponents can stretch for a long time, not to mention the battle with the participation of several dozen statists. In this situation, the absence in the game is especially annoyed
According to the tradition of all the eastern warriors during the battles, the prince should shout bloodthirsty speech, like “Padhada Padhada, I will be Dalat Shaurma!".
the style of the car carrier (what can you do – in those days, Yataganov with infrared heads of self -confidence has not yet been invented). A typical example: a series of dexterous prizes you laid the next enemy and have already prepared to stick a dagger into him, but then you were hooked on the back with a halberd, and while you are trying to take aim at the lying monster, he already manages to rise. Horror! In addition to this disgrace, the monsters are trained in the art of teleportation – as soon as the reptiles begin to seem that you ran away from them too far, they disappear from their places and immediately arise in front of your nose. And the last nail in the coffin cover for the most patient players: the exact number of enemies is never known in advance. At the beginning of the battle, their “population” consists of five to six “individuals”, the rest are shipped to the level from the bins of the homeland as the initial batch is exterminated. In general, with the conceptuality of the fighting, the developers, in my opinion, went over the stick. But this would not have been such a big problem if it were not for the disadvantages of the keyboard management. The fact is that with movement we control the left hand from the keyboard (standard layout of the WASD), the mouse is responsible for the attack and at the same time controls the rotation and removal of the camera. Everything seems to be correct, but the player’s movements are tied to the current position of the camera, and if it is moved during the battle, then “forward” can turn into “back” in an instant. But this is not all – the camera sometimes begins to live its own life, for example, changes the perspective when performing a somersault. In general, the battles are beautiful and spectacular in appearance, but stupid and fussy in essence, and most importantly – difficult for passing. Believe me, not a single “jump” episode and not a single puzzle task, of which there are also a lot in the game, will take away from you as much time as the successful passage of even the very first mass battle will take, in which you will have to save the beautiful headlight from imminent death. East is a delicate matter Information about the technical base of the game became public almost simultaneously with the start of work on the project – the JADE cross -platform engine, which had previously lit up at Splinter Cell, was used in the creation of Prince of Persia. But we all know that the engine itself is a deep secondary thing. The most important thing is the presence of talented artists and animators in the team. Since I managed to praise the animation at the very beginning of the review, let’s see how the situation is with everything else.
The interface forgives the player’s coarse mistakes: if the prince is now losing his balance and falls, he will still have time to grab the log and hang over the waterfall.
From a purely technical point of view of the schedule in the game, no complaints are in the game, you can only complain about high system requirements – the owners of GeForce 2 and even GeForce 4 MX, this game can become an extra reason for the upgrade. The textures are drawn very qualitatively, the models of the characters, although they do not hit the records by the number of landfills per virtual soul, nevertheless look smooth and pretty, special effects and competent lighting look very beautiful … However, the strongest part of the game is not technical bells and whistles, but an excellent design of levels. The guys who have been pissing over cards in the game are worthy of the highest awards of our Academy of Arts with you. To invent and simulate such a number of stunningly beautiful, interesting and various stages and at the same time never hit or self -digitalization is akin to the most real feat. The sound in the game is to match the graphics: reliable, very high quality and completely not annoying. Even better, voice acting characters, especially the prince. I have not heard such a sexual male voice for a very long time. And if the modern secretaries were not so fixed on “Soper” and “Soliter”, but preferred more advanced games, then after the release of The Sands of Time would certainly increase the level of divorces around the world. The soundtrack also deserves the most flattering epithets-ancient Eastern motifs in soft software processing fit perfectly into the game surroundings and create an appropriate mood. It is a pity that music sounds only during the fighting – just when the player, by and large, is completely not up to it. ******* Unfortunately, the magazine is not rubber, and to tell about the game as much as I would like, you can’t. Behind the scenes there was a description of the gaming puzzles, although they deserve the highest rating. There was no place for a detailed description of the battles, although neither a word, nor even screenshots are able to convey this crazy drive and amazing plastic movements in the best traditions of Hong Kong militants … Believe me alone: the prince should play even without all these delights – for a full -fledged exciting game with more than only acrobatics would have been enough. In a word – in no case do not miss! Let us not be the best in front of us, but definitely one of the most worthy action of the year.
Gameplay : 8 Graphics : 10 Sound and music : 9 Interface and management : 7 Novelty : 9 Mania rating : 9.0 Waited? Typical story “1001 nights”, retold in the manner of … Max Payne. The ingenious alloy of excellent design, excellent acrobatics and hurricane battles is one of the best action of the year. The justification of expectations : 95%





