Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones Preview

Having this feature in the game will allow players the opportunity of experiencing an enhanced version of Warrior Within’s “backtracking”. The story’s plot in of itself is indeed linear, however the approach Ubisoft is taking with it will mix a feel of “backtracking while going forward” in terms of the Prince’s journey. At certain points in the game, the Prince will be faced with a series of different objectives, and the way they must be approached should change every time.

Now how does Prince actually go about this adventure? In Sands of Time, it was a linear quest of teamwork with the Maharaja’s daughter in Farah. In Warrior Within, you relied heavily on combat to thwart the Empress of Time’s minions as well as avoiding the pursuing Dahaka. The main feature of Two Thrones will be that of a form of “pseudo-stealth”. Now don’t take that phrase as this game turning the franchise into something like Splinter Cell, even though Ubisoft creates those games as well. While the Ubisoft team has indeed given the AI the ideals of enemies from the SC franchise, you hardly have to worry about being cautious in your approaches to them. Two Thrones should really feel a lot like Warrior Within with the combined elements of extreme combat with the platforming and puzzle mechanics. The only thing different here now is the extreme action can be approached very differently!

Instead of taking on the traits of Splinter Cell and having the Prince take out his enemies in secret, or approaching it with a “slash with swords and ask questions” later mentality; Two Thrones encourages players to take out their adversaries with “quick kills!” This has been implemented to allow players to prevent enemies from calling for reinforcements or facing the possibility of entering the traditional PoP style of battle. Quick kills will work with a “Matrix-like” feel by having them occur in slow motion sequences. When initiating a quick kill attack, a specific kind of time prompt will appear onscreen. If you manage to do the striking down of your opponent in this time window, you’ll get your kill! However if you fail in that regards, you will suffer a likely health penalty by being stabbed in the stomach or something like that.

Two Thrones will still very much support the combat style of Warrior Within, but quick kills will allow players of the game to not bother with that sort of thing if they don’t wish to. To really get a feel for how that can work, the Prince can be seen performing ruthless moves in a couple scenes. In one, he jumps from building to building as the city remains on fire. Then in the process of one of those jumps, he spots potential prey, leaps towards and onto him, and immediately takes him down with a nasty throat slash! Another scene shows the Prince rapidly sliding down a ladder whose bottom begins several feet above the ground. When at the bottom, the Prince swings himself upside down, grabs a passing enemy Splinter Cell-style, and kills him!

To enhance the variety of the game’s play mechanics even moreso, the Dark Prince will feature his own assortment of abilities through the use of his deadly whip! In actual combat, he can use that scary looking thing to both disarm his enemies as well as dragging ones to him for some brutal sword slashes. In a more effective sense that directly correlates to the game’s “quick kills”, the Dark Prince can also use the whip to break enemies’ necks from a short distance.

In terms of what the Prince can do with his incredible acrobatics, everything isn’t quite known about that. But what we do know is two of the Prince’s new abilities happen to be a wall shimmy and a diagonal type jump. Two Thrones will also seemingly feature a number of “Dahaka-like” chase scenes, only not coupled with Godsmack’s “I Stand Alone” this time around. Also sounding cool are the game’s newly implemented chariot races. We don’t know exactly how those will work, but it’s a nice feature to make the game feel more like it’s from the “ancient middle eastern” era. Also listening to consumers of both games, Yannis has assured us that the music and voice acting presentations in this game will far outdo that of both predecessors. The music will have a combination of rock and the traditional PoP themes to accompany sequences, and each side of the Prince will actually feature a different voice!

So in other words, this is it. This is the last chance for the Prince to really fix everything he’s done in recent years, intentionally or not. His love interest is dead, his past lies in shambles and the only home he’s ever known is veiled in chaos. He must find out what is happening in Babylon and why, with events possibly being connected to the ancient Tower of Babylon. Utilizing desperate measures with the Prince’s very well-known acrobatics and combat, take to the streets and rooftops of his home city to finally set things right! Look forward to Prince of Persia 3: The Two Thrones this coming November!