When you’re not trying out for the circus you’ll be saddled with a pretty functional combat system that does an excellent job of catering to multi-enemy combat. Instead of opting for the lame right analog stick-based combat system employed in titles such as
Blade II PoP goes for a very simplified directional-based system. It’s simple, simply point the left analog stick at a character and hit the button to attack. Fluid gameplay allows you to attack multiple enemies at once too so that you can keep them in check, black ninja style. If that’s not good enough the prince can also jump off of walls to attack and vault over enemies to attack them from behind. Early on the in the game you’ll also acquire a dagger that gives you the ability to control time.
With the dagger you’ll be able to manipulate time to your liking. So let’s say you misjudge a gap and you fall to your doom. In most games you’d be dead and you’d have to start over again. In Sands of Time you can use the dagger to reverse time for up to 10 seconds, giving you another chance to attack the gap. This also helps in combat too; let’s say you’re getting worked over by a number of enemies. Well you can reverse the time so that you can go back through the sequence and regain your health again. You’ll also be able to do a number of other cool things with the dagger such as slowing down time and using it as an offensive weapon to slice foes in half.
You can be sure that you’ll face plenty of puzzles but they’re all well done and make a hell of a lot of sense. Yes, there is an abundance of those lame crate puzzles that were done to death in the
Tomb Raider series, but somehow this game makes them seem logical and worthwhile. I never really felt like I was performing a chore when I was pushing these crates over the switches. It felt like a vital part of the game and there was a logical reason that I was doing it. To make things even better you’ll never really feel lost throughout the course of the game. Even though the game places you into some pretty imposing situations with some massively large environments, the game does an excellent job of showing you where you need to go and what you need to do. Even in the harder puzzles there are subtle hints that will help guide you through the process. If that weren’t enough for you the game is segmented into various save points. Walking into a save point gives your player a vision of what’s to come, clueing you in on what you can expect and how you can go about solving the upcoming puzzles. This makes all the difference when you’re placed in a huge room where a single switch rests atop a lonesome ledge. Instead of wandering around for 20 minutes and feeling lost you’ll be able to attack your goal right away without lollygagging around.
One of my favorite gameplay aspects is the ability to pull the camera out to get a better overview of the situation. With the simple press of the L2 button the button pans out and showcases the action in a quasi-Resident Evil style camera. When playing in this view you get a better idea of the layout and your current status. From this point you can choose to play from this vantage point or go back to the traditional 3rd person camera that the game defaults to. You can also press R2 button for a first person view. This helps you look at precarious ledges and various points that you need to travel across.
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