I picked up the new Prince of Persia game for the PC at GoGamer's "Red Monday" sale. So far, I've found the game to be a pretty solid platformer and it brings some of the "free world" aspects from Assassin's Creed, though mainly in the form of choosable objectives. My main complaint with the game so far is in some of the "button jam" quick-time events. Apparently, the game way never playtested with my mouse (a Logitech laser mouse) as it appears to be impossible to pass any of the button-mashing events with it. I had to pull out my ancient Microsoft USB mouse in order to click quickly enough to clear the event. This means that I now have three mice at my desk--the mouse for all the machines but the Vista box and two mice for Vista.

I find the new personality of the Prince to be substantially more likable than what the Sands of Time prince eventually devolved into. It seems as though this Prince is more snarky and less angsty which I find more enjoyable. Also, the slightly cell-shaded style is visually appealing without seeming overly cartoony.

I am less sure about the complete inability to die that the game provides to the player. In a sense, it is completely reasonable given the ease of saving and other such things, but it also provides a much more visceral sense of frustration. For instance, when fighting a boss if you reach a "die" situation (fall off a ledge or take too much damage and miss the quicktime event), rather than dying, you are saved at the last second and the boss gets some amount of its health back. So far, I haven't been able to determine what the rationale for the amount the boss gets back is. At least once, it has recovered over 50% of max health (from about 30% to about 80%). Another time, it recovered perhaps only 10%. Obviously, the former leads to anger especially if you hit a die situation because you failed a button-mashing challenge.

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