stealth toilet
Moderator
I got a chance to play this game on the 360 yesterday. I was curious to see how the whole "never dieing" thing worked in the game. I must say I was a bit underwhelmed with it, as there seems to be little point in playing the game if there's no chance of being rewarded for playing it well.
The combat system was interesting, very old-school PoP where everything revolves around one on one duels and a mixture of footwork, parrying, and attacking. Again though, a little lackluster. The Prince's sword (which is impossibly crafted for his scabbard) isn't really a sword because he can't cut any enemy with it, its just sort of a bludgeon he smacks enemies with. There's a lot of outlandish, acrobatic chain attacks which might be cool if they weren't so easy to pull off and had a little more combo variety to them. But again, with no fear of death, and no real satisfying combat controls, the desire to do anything more than button mash your way through combat is non-existent.
It seems like the game might as well have been put on rails and relied solely on quicktime-button presses to navigate the Prince through each level. I heard terms like "open-world" thrown around, but as far as I could tell that didn't really apply. You do get to pick the levels you go to first, but you can access each one through an overworld map, like Super Mario World, and actually footing it to each new area is essentially what would have previously constituted the "level" that preceded each world boss. Of course, none of it is really engaging, and the entire game can be played completely absent-mindedly, because there's not much challenge to begin with and not any way in which you can affect your position, positively or negatively.
The game tells you exactly what to do and how to do it, and then if you deviate from that plan at all you are immediately set back where you went wrong in order to do it right again. The actual player's input in this game seems like a polite suggestion more than a command, and as a result anything cool that does happen on screen doesn't really feel like a product of your own ingenuity and skill. It feels like jumping through one hoop correctly just so you can try to jump through the next.
The combat system was interesting, very old-school PoP where everything revolves around one on one duels and a mixture of footwork, parrying, and attacking. Again though, a little lackluster. The Prince's sword (which is impossibly crafted for his scabbard) isn't really a sword because he can't cut any enemy with it, its just sort of a bludgeon he smacks enemies with. There's a lot of outlandish, acrobatic chain attacks which might be cool if they weren't so easy to pull off and had a little more combo variety to them. But again, with no fear of death, and no real satisfying combat controls, the desire to do anything more than button mash your way through combat is non-existent.
It seems like the game might as well have been put on rails and relied solely on quicktime-button presses to navigate the Prince through each level. I heard terms like "open-world" thrown around, but as far as I could tell that didn't really apply. You do get to pick the levels you go to first, but you can access each one through an overworld map, like Super Mario World, and actually footing it to each new area is essentially what would have previously constituted the "level" that preceded each world boss. Of course, none of it is really engaging, and the entire game can be played completely absent-mindedly, because there's not much challenge to begin with and not any way in which you can affect your position, positively or negatively.
The game tells you exactly what to do and how to do it, and then if you deviate from that plan at all you are immediately set back where you went wrong in order to do it right again. The actual player's input in this game seems like a polite suggestion more than a command, and as a result anything cool that does happen on screen doesn't really feel like a product of your own ingenuity and skill. It feels like jumping through one hoop correctly just so you can try to jump through the next.
