61 Frames Per Second : Adam Rosenberg

The 61FPS Review: Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

John Constantine — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:30:00 GMT

Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. is a fun game. Flying a state-of-the-art combat jet over satellite-rendered landscapes in a game halfway between simulation and twitch thrills just works. The control is simple, the goals basic. But let’s be honest here. You don’t play game about flying a killer plane and look for a reflective experience. You play it for the rush of speed and vertigo, narrow escapes and quick action. H.A.W.X. provides that. Just not enough of it.

Unnecessary or not, there is context for the dogfighting. H.A.W.X. falls between Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter 2 and EndWar in the arching Tom Clancy timeline. You are David Crenshaw, a one-time USAF pilot who left the military life behind for better pay and hours as a contractor at Artemis Global Security. USAF pilots, in Tom Clancy land, are usually good and private military corporations like Artemis Global are typically bad, so you can probably guess what the big mid-story twist is. Crenshaw, in a cruel twist of fate/genre convention, learns that the sweet life isn’t necessarily the good life. This is Tom Clancy 101, meaningful for fetishists only, since it doesn’t serve much purpose beyond putting you in a plane.

The missions are uniform: you fly the unfriendly skies, zeroing in on yellow targets and protecting green ones. H.A.W.X. keeps the aerial violence speedy with its unique taskmaster, the Enhanced Reality System (ERS). Pressing a button when prompted activates the ERS, creating a tight tunnel of lit checkpoints on screen. By flying through the tunnel, players can intercept pursuing fighters and outfly incoming missiles. It also serves several mission-specific purposes, such as creating a flight path through heavily defended enemy airspace or lining up the correct angle of attack for a covered ground target. The ERS objectives show up infrequently, to great effect. It’s an ecstatic thrill to speed through the tight confines of an ERS tunnel, flak exploding around you, a ringing lock-on buzzer serves keeping you stressfully aware of your safety zone.

Basic flight and ERS are all well and good, but H.A.W.X. is at its best after Assistance OFF mode is introduced, roughly three or four missions into the campaign. Double-tapping either trigger button activates a distant third-person view of the action, and the camera locks itself onto any targeted enemy. You’re left with a greater freedom of movement since the view is no longer restricted to what’s in front of you. The tradeoff is that your jet’s safety features are turned off as well, which means the engine will stall if you lose too much speed. That isn’t a big deal when you’re 50,000 feet in the air, but it’s a bit more worrisome when that number is closer to fifty.

H.A.W.X.’s problem is that there’s just not enough variety. Your time in the cockpit is over and done in just under eight hours, and at the end of it, you’ll only have earned about half of the experience needed to unlock all the game’s extra planes and weapons. H.A.W.X. does support cooperative online multiplayer as well competitive online play for two to eight, and both modes also earn the player experience. The co-op is enjoyable, especially since each player can set his or her own difficulty level, but since competitive play comes in just one flavor, team deathmatch, it does nothing to alleviate the end game doldrums. Compounding the problem of unlocking is that most of the big ticket challenges will have been completed by the time you’ve finished the campaign. With several thousand experience points separating each level, the 5-50 points earned per downed enemy fosters a monotonous grind which will turn most players off. Even then though, there isn’t a whole lot to do with all of those sweet unlocks.

H.A.W.X. desperately wants to be a great game. It gives you these beautiful environments, tons of fun to control fighter jets, little elements that scream “Love me!” Then a handful of hours have passed and you’ve seen all there is to see in the campaign and despaired at the thought of slowly grinding through the last experience levels. You had a little bit of fun, but you can’t help but think it could have been so much more.

Grade: B-

Previous Reviews:

Suikoden Tierkreis
Eat Lead - The Return of Matt Hazard
Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop
Resident Evil 5
Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

The 61FPS Review: Killzone 2

John Constantine — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

NOTE: The following review and the grade attached to it are based entirely on Killzone 2’s single player campaign. Stay tuned to 61FPS for a follow-up, post-release examination of the game’s considerable multiplayer component.

Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

There may be hundreds of them, but first-person shooters can really be broken down into two categories. The first type of FPS is marked by a strong balance between play, narrative, difficulty and pacing. If that balance is good enough, the game warrants a full playthrough. The other type is competent and even entertaining, but it’s just one more game with a gun. For one reason or another, maybe the challenge isn’t engaging enough to keep me going, maybe it’s the story, this type loses my interest long before the credits roll. Guerilla Games’ Killzone 2 almost falls into the latter camp for me. Had it not been for the demands of this review, I never would have finished the game.

I’m glad I stuck it out though. Killzone 2 stumbles in its first half. Unwieldy controls, awkward combat dynamics and an unfocused, impersonal narrative are a lethal combination. But during the game’s back half, everything gels. It just takes some time to get there.

While most of it falls under the generic, game-with-a-gun banner, the aforementioned unwieldy controls set Killzone 2 apart from its peers. Like its predecessor, Killzone 2 is a cover-based FPS. Unlike every other post-Gears of War, cover-heavy shooter (first- or third-person), a single button press does not lock you in to a “safe” location. In Killzone 2, you have to hold down the Dualshock’s L2 trigger to take and remain under cover. This is piled on top of button presses for iron sights aiming and firing, leaning with the left analog stick and the occasional D-pad press for sniper scope zooms. I know that’s a lot of busy language, but it’s even harder on your hands. You’re left with a lot of busy fingers stretched into uncomfortable positions. I’ll admit, a big part of why the game’s first half felt so uneven to me had to do with my own failings. I had to spend time unlearning modern FPS controls to adapt to Killzone 2. The game’s unorthodox combat scenarios and aggressive AI only steepen the learning curve.

Consider Call of Duty or even Gears of War. In those, players find cover, fire across a “No Man’s Land” at the enemy and push ever-forward in the process. This is traditional war simulation, fighting for inches. The emphasis in Killzone 2 is instead placed on surviving within a dynamic battlefield. Your Helghast enemies are smart, always on the move, and terribly efficient even in the game’s default, “Normal” difficulty setting. They’ll chuck grenades, fire blind to keep your squad suppressed, support one another with intersecting arcs of fire; they move and act like trained soldiers. Fortunately, Killzone 2’s battlefields are massive. There are typically multiple routes to any destination, including one or two which lead to prime flanking opportunities and tackling these opportunities forces acclimating to the controls. If you’ve got an uncomfortable grip on the controller, then you’ve probably been hunkered down in one place for too long. Some fudging of the rules under Killzone 2’s hood unbalances what would be an otherwise absorbing challenge. Helghast soldiers tend to blind fire with pinpoint accuracy from behind cover. They also seem to have a sixth sense for knowing when a sniper rifle’s crosshairs have drawn a bead. Their ammo supplies are apparently limitless as well; there are no wars of attrition in this game. You simply choose a tactic, push forward and hope like hell that things work out. Even the weapon selection feels unbalanced in the early going. Killzone 2’s assault rifles are inaccurate and underpowered. Short bursts are the order of the day, but for medium- and long-range engagements, players will find that their pistol — with its unlimited ammo — is the best bet. Like everything else in the game, variety comes later on. Sniper rifles pop up along with shotguns, two variations of LMG, flamethrowers, grenade launchers and the boltgun, a shottie/’nade launcher crossbreed. Good times, for those who stick it out.

The incentives to stick it out beyond play, namely story and visual thrills, are mixed but rewarding. Narrative is often an afterthought in militaristic shooters, and Killzone impersonal tale certainly doesn’t do it any favors. Too much time is spent on the big picture of the ongoing conflict between the ISA (Space America) and the Helghast (Space Nazis), with little time spent on developing character beyond archetype. Dramatic incident can’t inject personality into a story when the incidents are so predictable. For half the game, players will be running through the standard battery of military missions: take out this turret or armor, capture this point, blow up this structure, etc. Graphically, Killzone 2 is stunning. Many of the indoor environments feel same-y and bland, but every outdoor battlefield in the game is a powerful spectacle. From the epic-scale backgrounds to the hordes of soldiers fighting the war around you, Killzone 2 lives up to its burden of proving the Playstation 3’s technical heft. Once again, the late game is considerably tighter in this regard, particularly a pitched battle on a moving train and a desperate last stand aboard a friendly cruiser stationed above Helghan.

It’s Killzone 2’s decidedly against-the-grain FPS experience that elevates it above the game-with-a-gun hordes. Considering the gobs of hype preceding it, I’m impressed by Guerilla’s willingness to separate itself from the pack with such demanding play. It’s rare to see game that favors repetition and constant spatial awareness over the measured, strategic play of its most popular competitors. But this is both the game’s most valuable asset and its greatest failing. In focusing so intently on making only certain aspects of Killzone unique — its strange control, its war play, its AI — Guerilla failed to make something solid throughout. Does it live up to the hype? How could it? Is it good? Absolutely.

Rating: B

Past Reviews:

Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

Weight of History: Velvet Assassin and National Identity in Game Design

John Constantine — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

Velvet Assassin is an anomaly. For one, it’s a Hard Stealth game. Not “hard” in the challenging sense — though expect the finished product to be difficult — but rather it stays true to its roots. Sneaking isn’t just one possible route to success in Velvet Assassin; it’s the only one. Show yourself even once, and get a face full of bullets for your troubles. I can’t even remember the last video game that focused solely on striking from the shadows.

Then there’s the premise and its real life inspiration. The game’s protagonist is Violette Summer. She works as an MI6 spy behind enemy lines during World War II. The game unfolds as a flashback, with Violette recounting her wartime experiences from a hospital ward. Violette Szabo is the real life velvet assassin. After her husband Etienne was killed in action at the Battle of Battle of El Amain, the twenty-two year-old Szabo joined Britain’s Special Operations Executive as a spy. She completed one successful mission in 1944, but was captured following an attempt to sabotage German communications prior to the Normandy invasion. After enduring months of torture and hardship while confined in a Nazi concentration camp, Szabo was executed in 1945.

The Nazis are the undisputed “bad guys” in the game — how could they not be? — but it’s interesting how nationality informs Assassin’s design. Its creators are Hamburg-based Replay Studios, and the context of their German heritage colors even a brief session with the game. For example, Violette frequently comes across personal effects belonging to one soldier or another. During my hands-on, I came across a love letter addressed to the sweetheart of a German soldier. Perhaps even the one whose throat I’d just viciously slashed open. In moments like these, it’s tangible how national perspective has affected the game’s development.

The play itself is rooted in classic stealth in the tradition of PS1-era Tenchu and Splinter Cell, a cyclical pattern of observing enemy patrol routes and employing misdirection to move from A to B unseen. When Violette’s violet, you’re safe; both she and her body-shaped health bar icon are cast in deep shades of purple to indicate concealment. Shadows aren’t a magic safety zone however. Enemies will react realistically to movement, cast shadows (thanks to some stellar lighting effects) and proximity. You could be hiding in Germany’s deepest, darkest shadow and still be spotted if an enemy soldier happens to pass by too closely.

Violette doesn’t have much more than her graceful self and a knife for defense. She’ll come across the odd firearm or two, but ammo is scarce. Her most helpful asset is her morphine supply, a tool that brings a novel twist in such a stayed genre. Since the game takes place in a flashback, Violette’s memory can be altered to ease the difficulty of play. When it’s used, morphine blur’s her recollections, and the dark leather spy outfit is replaced by a hospital gown. Enemy soldiers are highlighted by hazy backgrounds and white mist as time slows to a crawl. Violette cannot be seen when in a morphine state, granting her either a free stealth kill or safe passage through a heavily populated area.

At the start of the game, Violette can store no more than a single shot of morphine. This can change however. Scattered throughout the game are collectibles and hidden objectives. Picking up or completing these nets XP awards, which can be spent on upgrading one of three categories: strength, stealth and morphine. Each category is built on a five-star rating scale, though it is impossible to fully upgrade all three in the course of a single playthrough.

The problem with stealth-heavy games is that the pace is often too slow to hold the attention of all but the most genre-devoted players. Velvet Assassin’s traditional sneaking is at least augmented by an experience system allowing you to upgrade stealth and strength stats as well as the amount of morphine you can carry. Since it will be impossible to max out these stats in a single play through, individual player preference and style may foster a more “active” stealth experience. I also wonder how deeply national identity will inform the overall experience. After all, here we have a German developer making a game in which players kill unsuspecting German soldiers from the shadows. As I said, even a small portion of the game shows a real effort to humanize the enemy. As to how far Replay will go in making Nazi soldiers three-dimensional antagonists remains to be seen. Velvet Assassin was an honest-to-goodness surprise for me, not only for its generic (for its genre) play focus but also for the questions it raises about the continuing evolution of the game as an interactive art form.

Related links:

Returning to the Return of the Castle Wolfenstein Returned: This Time It’s Just Plain Ol’ Wolfenstein
The 61FPS Review: Metal Gear Solid 4
John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Character

Returning to the Return of the Castle Wolfenstein Returned: This Time It’s Just Plain Ol’ Wolfenstein

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:30:00 GMT

Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg covers games from his secret lair in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, typing, reading and playing the days away as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

There must be a considerable amount of tension around Raven Software’s offices as they prepare Wolfenstein, the latest sequel to the id Software’s grand-pappy of all first-person shooters. After all, the once-cool practice of gunning down Nazis with a beefy chain gun isn’t the uncommon gaming experience it once was. Then there’s Raven, whose talent is eclipsed not only by their recent history of releasing numerous interchangeable genre titles, but also living in the shadow of id themselves. That isn’t necessarily bad news for Wolfenstein, but it does have the effect of keeping expectations firmly in check. Seeing it at Activision’s New York City preview party certainly didn’t raise those expectations. A few minutes of watching Wolfenstein gave a bad impression: another generic World War II shooter with less-than-stellar graphics and straightforward action.

It’s when I stuck around for a few more minutes that things started to get odd. For example, there were suddenly Nazis flying through the air in slow motion. Turned out to be anti-gravity. That’s kind of weird. Then there was B.J. Blazkowicz using a magical amulet to “see” Nazis on the other side of a wall. And then shoot them. Not so conventional anymore. And that’s when the Veil descended. Apparently, B.J.’s fancy new amulet — picked up early in the game — allows BJ to slip into an “otherworld” at will, a place/state-of-being called the Veil. The makeup of the world remains roughly the same within the Veil, though everything is cast in aqua-green hues and spectral bee-like insects fly around lazily, gathering energy. The Veil is ethereal. Other. (Think Tron.) When inside the Veil, weak points are highlighted on enemies, an essential feature when dealing with larger, armored soldiers. The single heavy I saw during the demo was a sort Brotherhood of Steel/Imperial Stormtrooper amalgam armed with a weapon shooting blasts of the green energy blanketing the Veil. BJ will also need to slip into the Veil to access the amulet’s magical abilities; a time-slowing power was shown, but the on-screen amulet’s four slots suggest more Nazi-killin’ powers.

Put aside BJ’s supernatural powers and you’re still left with rote Nazi-killin’, right? Wrong. Wolfenstein is set in the city of Eisenstadt, an open environment situated around a central hub, with new areas opening as the game progresses. What’s more, there are three non-Nazi factions populating the city: Nazi resistance fighters, scholars who harbor an interest in the amulet and a shadowy black market. Players will be able to pick up optional missions to earn money, which can then be spent on the black market to upgrade or buy weapons. But the open world and non-linear play is not enough to justify the game’s existence. There needs to be an immersive experience attached to it, one that leaves room for player-tailoring to co-exist with a scripted storyline. This is what made Far Cry 2 stand-out from the over-crowded FPS field. It is, however, encouraging to see Raven stepping away from the generic corridor shooter towards the faux-RPG trappings of their Jedi Knight series. Time – and additional previews and hands-on sessions – will tell, but first impressions at least point to a new direction for the Wolfenstein series. That’s saying something for a series that created its genre.

Related links:

Bringing Sexy Back: John Carmack
Whatcha Playing: Far Cry 2
John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Open World

Cross-Atlantic Buzz!

John Constantine — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Guest contributor Adam Rosenberg resides in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he slaves away daily as a contributing editor for UGO’s Gamesblog as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

Relentless Software’s Buzz games are multi-stage quiz challenges modeled after television game shows, right down to the snarky announcer. Players compete for points in multiple rounds, each one revolving around a different gimmick for rewarding or punishing correct and incorrect answers. The thing about Buzz is that it’s always been big in Europe, but not so much over here in the States. The series debuted in the UK back in October 2005 with Buzz!: The Music Quiz and it saw three sequels before hitting North America in October 2007. The PS3 debut, Buzz! Quiz TV, featuring both user-created quizzes and online play, is Sony’s most focused attempt to establish the series in America. When I approached the new American Culture Quiz Pack expansion, I wondered: how does the ‘American angle’ come out in a game so firmly rooted in its British origins? Is American trivia the key to Buzz’s potential cross-continental success?

The allure of a game show is, after all, rooted in the American Pop Dream. When television first proliferated as an entertainment medium during the 1950s, quiz shows were some of the biggest attention-grabbers. All of a sudden, Joey Everyman could stand in front of a camera, answer some trivia questions and go home several thousand dollars richer. Fame and fortune; just what every American wants. Buzz’s rewards are, admittedly, lower. In the absence of Fabulous Cash Prizes, you get bragging rights over how much smarter you are than your friends, relatives or faceless entities you connect to via the PlayStation Network. So it’s no surprise we Americans prefer the immediate thrills of dart-throwing in Wii Play to the challenge of Buzz’s quiz show. Let’s face it folks: thinking is an awful lot of work.

Hard work at that. As my fiancée and I crossed wits in a series of matches, I learned quickly that I know surprisingly little about American Culture. I don’t think I’m alone either. How many of you readers out there really know who created Jell-O? Or any specific state mottos outside of your own and New Hampshire’s (hint: title of Die Hard 4)? The American Culture Quiz Pack is made up of five-hundred questions, five-hundred disparate bits of trivia, culled from the collective history and geographical makeup of fifty states, that are bound to stump anyone who isn’t a full-fledged US historian. Even my fiancée, with her PhD in American Studies, got more wrong than she did right. (She trounced me easily enough, but that’s nothing new in our relationship.)

Like a rear view mirror, our country is bigger than it first appears when filtered through Buzz. The minutia of culture, pop and proper, ends up far deeper than you expect it to be. That’s the American angle in Buzz. Will it capture an expanded American audience? Probably not.

The 61FPS Review: Prince of Persia

John Constantine — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Guest reviewer Adam Rosenberg resides in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where he slaves away daily as a contributing editor for UGO’s Gamesblog as his dog Loki looks on in bewilderment. In addition to the noble pursuit of video games, Adam enjoys spending time with fine film, finer food and his fine fiancée Bekah.

I’m not really sure the title “Prince of Persia” is relevant anymore. After all, in Ubisoft’s latest – a reboot of the trilogy started with Sands of Time – you play a wandering scoundrel: two parts Han Solo, two parts le Parkour founder David Belle and one part Indiana Jones. You could argue that the open-world, Middle Eastern-flavored surroundings might be situated in an ancient, fantasy-world version of Persia, but it just as easily might not be. But hey, that’s brand recognition for you.

Prince of Persia is a streamlined spectacle, lighter on challenge than previous series entries but also more visually appealing by several orders of magnitude, thanks to the face-lifted, cel-shaded art design. Meanwhile, the gameplay remains fundamentally unchanged; as the titular (not-)Prince, you’ll still be wall-running, column-groping and bar-swinging, all of it supplemented by increasingly frequent dalliances with magic.

But to be honest, there’s not much in the way of "game" in Prince of Persia. It is essentially a massive, player-guided Quick Time Event broken up by occasional displays of QTE-fueled swordplay.

Traversing the game’s environments is surprisingly fulfilling, the Prince’s fluid grace keeping your eyes glued to the screen. The platforming is successful because it hides its QTE-nature behind a series of environmental signifiers. Outside of combat, the game never explicitly tells you which button to press after the tutorial ends. If you come across a brass ring affixed to the wall or ceiling, press B when the Prince reaches it and he’ll automatically use it to maintain his momentum. At other times, the screen will start to grey out during a longer-than-usual jump; quickly press Y in these situations to call in Elika for an aided double jump.

Elika, the Prince’s constant AI companion, is Persia's two-birds-one-stone solution to the recent trilogy's tropes: a love interest and a way to cheat death. But where last generation's Princes demanded skillfull use of those games' time-warping to fix mistakes, Prince of Persia’s play is entirely risk-free: Elika simply won’t let the Prince die. Ever. Fall off a ledge or land in a pool of deadly Corruption and her glowing hand will appear to catch you and drag you back to the last bit of solid ground you stood on. “Die” in combat and she’ll resurrect you instantly with the only penalty being a slight health boost for you opponent.

The words “Game Over” never appear on the screen for Prince of Persia’s duration. It’s a ballsy move for Ubisoft, and I’m not so sure it pays off in this outing. The problem with Prince of Persia is that it leaves most of the work in the hands of AI, whether it's the Prince's pathfinding or Elika's helping hands. That’s why the platforming compares so easily with your average QTE; all the player ever has to worry about is running in the right direction and pressing the jump, grab or Elika buttons at the proper moments. The no-fail, low-risk arrangement fosters experimentation, but the paths in Prince of Persia’s are far too linear to make such experimentation feel worthwhile.

The disparity between the platforming and the combat is sizable. The combat is schizophrenic, vacillating in the space of a single encounter between absurdly easy and unforgivingly difficult without ever really striking the proper balance. Each fight is a one-on-one encounter in a closed, arena-like space. Combos are performed by alternating between sword, acrobatic, gauntlet and Elika attacks, each of which is mapped to its own face button. Enemies frequently break up combos by performing special attacks which trigger proper, on-screen-button-prompt QTEs. A single-button QTE also appears when the Prince is nearing death, as a sort of restorative last-minute save which puts you back in the fight without the enemy gaining any health back. Unfortunately, there's no solid rhythm to these battles. You're given an unforgivingly short window to pull off special attack QTEs, to the point that you need to recognize the attack animation and respond with a button press before the actual prompt appears. Conversely, the last-minute save QTEs are next-to-impossible to fail. As such, basically every combat encounter features the same pattern of attack combo, failed QTE, successful QTE, repeat.

The overarching narrative: a formerly imprisoned, recently freed malevolent god has corrupted the land. There are four main “zones,” each one broken up into six unique areas: an entry point, a boss tower, and four discrete spaces lying between the entry and end points. The goal in each of the twenty-four areas is to reach its Fertile Ground, which Elika can use to wipe away the surrounding Corruption. Persia's story is secondary, but unsuccessfully so. Exposition in Prince of Persia is a momentum-killer. Dialogues with Elika, the game's chief source of story, requires coming to a complete stop and triggering a string of non-interactive cutscenes. It's comforting that most of these expository moments are optional, but it's a less-than-ideal way to relate the story.

What’s amazing about Prince of Persia is that, in spite of all its shortfalls, it’s actually a blast to play. The combat never manages to hit its stride and the optional expository moments quickly become more of a chore than anything else, but the simple beauty of moving from A to B keeps the proceedings entertaining throughout. I’m not sure Prince of Persia’s challenge-free dynamic will appeal to every gamer, but it succeeds brilliantly as interactive spectacle and provides a great entry point for inexperienced gamers who’d like to tunnel into the Core.

Grade: B

61FPS Reviews:

LittleBigPlanet part 1, Part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3