It really, really has been bothering me. I picked up PoP for the 360 the day it came out, set aside everything else I was playing at the time (sorry, Fallout, Dead Space, etc.) and dug into the Prince’s latest endeavour.
It was good, I guess. It felt different, but enough like last generation’s trilogy that I was happy to play it. But something was off. It wasn’t quite, and still quite isn’t, a game in the purest sense.
Now I’ll be the first to defend casual games and gaming, not because I particularly care for it, but because I think that the argument that casual games are ruining the market it moot. It’s happening: games as a medium are changing, get over it.
But here, in Ubisoft Montreal's very loose approximation of
Not the game as a whole, just the crummy your-timing-better-be-perfect sequences. Tell me, Ubisoft, why you would design a world that is so simple to use, but then make the rules of play inconsistent? Why is it that the B button (extend your run) and the Y button (get help from your companion, Elika) are openly encouraged to be mashed by the player to ensure success, while pressing the A button more than once in almost any scenario results in Prince taking a huge-goddamn-leap into open space?
Let me explain: there are colored plates throughout the world that allow Elika to use her powers to get Prince somewhere he couldn’t get on his own. To use them, you just press Y while Prince is on one. If, however, the plate happens to be on a wall, which is not uncommon, you have to press the Y button to use the plate before Prince falls to his death. The game doesn’t mind if you mash Y long before or long after using the plate—it won’t mess anything up. This applies to the use of the B button too, to grab rings and other things in the world that will help Prince get around. Mash the button and you’ll make sure Prince uses it. No special timing required.
Here’s the rub. The A button? You better not dick around. Let’s say you’re pressing the A button to get Prince to run up a wall, at the top of which he will grab the ledge. You better not be accustomed, from every other scenario in the game, to mashing buttons because if you were to press A, say, twice in this situation, it would lead to Prince running up the wall as normal, waiting to end of his animation, and then leaping backwards off of that wall into whatever oblivion you just avoided earlier. Why do A button commands queue while no other ones do?
While I’m griping about those plates, I have another big question. What is the deal with those goddamn plates? They just dilute the gameplay in every way. If they’re not sucking the fun out of the acrobatics (you know, the point of PoP) by flying you to the top of a huge and would-have-been-fun-to-scale-tower, they’re frustrating the living crap out of you by making you do these weird, Sonic-the-Hedgehog-like running sections. And they’re long. And if you bump into anything while running forward at an uncontrolled speed you go right back to the start. Oh, and Prince can’t move left and right too fast while in this running mode, so you better have a good memory for trial and error. Why would you use these, Ubisoft? Elika’s “powers” (flight, slingshotting, super-wall-running) are supposed to help Prince, and they do in a real sense, but they don’t help the game. They get him somewhere minus all the fun of figuring out how to get there yourself.
I do have praise for it though, really. The story-telling is marvellous. Maybe not the story itself, but the manner in which it’s told is quite ingenious. Ninety percent of PoP’s story is told through conversations with your partner Elika. What’s beautiful about this is that you can choose to never talk to her. If you’re the action-oriented gamer with no care for the motives behind your character’s actions, you’re free to be that player. If you’re like me, and you lap up any tiny droplet of story, you have hundreds of story and character enhancing dialogues to look forward to. It caters so well to two completely opposing types of players. Way to be, Ubisoft.
Oh yeah, the game is beautiful too, but you can look at some screens instead of reading about that.
In the end though, I’m just left a bit confused. On paper, I really don’t like this game. In play, it’s totally got me by the nose. I probably won’t play anything else until it’s done. It's still Prince.
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There's also a few other things about this PoP that's rather unfortunate. A lot of the game is fairly repetitive. As far as I've played in the game, there hasn't been too many changes in terms of the formula of how to get through an area.
ReplyDeleteMost areas are seperated from the others by cliffs around them, forcing you to either wallrun over to them or jump using the pillars to them. The combat in the game, while looking exceptionally stylish, doesn't offer too much in terms of depth. The player tends to repeat the same movements over and over again, and while you can link combos together, they don't feel as free flowing as first marketed and described.
The game is still good, and very pretty. But it does seem like a safe approach on the prince concept, and an attempt at getting more sales out of this IP.