Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

February 20, 2006

I just finished Prince Of Persia Warrior Within.

Well.. actually I almost finished it like 3 months ago. But there was one fight remaining which, it turns out now, was the final boss fight. I ditched it back then because it was just so insanely complex. But now, I wanted to get this over with, so I got an “unlimited life” trainer and went with it.

The final fight was indeed insanely complex – with normal life, I would have been killed like 10 times. But just one final fight is not that bad in cheating ;) I completed the rest of the game before it fully on my own – I’m not sure if I glanced on some walkthroughs once or twice, but that was it.

I had completed Sands of Time before, and there are new titles coming out, like the Two Thrones, and one for my PSP, so it made sense to get the previous/pending/current one out of the way.

The game itself is good. Some major innovations in the fighting system, like dual weapons and freeform fighting with great acrobatics and many special moves. They’re not secret/hidden so that you’d accidentally have to discover them like in Mortal Kombat or something – the combos list shows them all, and they’re there for you to learn and master. I think I eventually got only about a third of them, so I guess it would be fun to start all over and do it again to brush up, but I just can’t find the time. And you need plenty, because the game is LONG. I think it took me something like a month of gameplay of about an hour a day or something like that. But I guess I’ll still replay it at some point, because there are supposedly two endings – one, which I got currently, where the girl dies, and another, where you save the girl and kill the beast instead.

One interesting approach here is past vs present – you go through the same locations several times, but some of those times are in past and others in present and you constantly switch through the two in the game through special portals. And there are different traps/puzzles in past and present too.

It made sense to start with “Sands of Time”, as it was lighter in the setting. Warrior Within is very dark, grim, violent and everything else that comes with it. 16+ PEGI rating with “violence” mark. Decapitation, strangulation, slicing your enemies in half… whatever suits you. I found all sorts of jumps and bounces – around the columns or off the walls or over your enemy – to be fun and easily mastered. Plus the combos where you twist and turn to inflict maximum damage.