Prince of Persia: Warrior Within Review

The Free Form Fighting System (referred to as FFF) is what Ubisoft came up with, and they sure didn’t disappoint this time around. The Prince can now dawn two weapons at once, a sword and either another mini sword, an axe, a dagger, a mace, a special sword from certain enemies or a smaller version of a scythe. This allows the Prince to have endless possibilities with what he can do with his weapons, as well as with his environment.

There are combos you can perform with one weapon that you can’t do with two and vice versa. How you interact with your enemies and your surrounding environment also has been completely revamped so that you have more freedom with what you can do, and it’s truly amazing just how much you can actually do.

So to make the critique of this section a little more organized and painless, it will be divided into 2 sections for combat, one weapon and your surroundings, and dual weapons and your surroundings.

One Weapon/Your Surroundings: Even with only one weapon, you can do a heck of a lot in battle. Of course it won’t be quite as easy to take out your enemies and/or defend yourself, but you are given more freedom since you have one of your hands available for other uses! With just one weapon, you have plenty of options as your disposal. You can either choose to go the hard way and simply fight, or you can take advantage of your enemies’ stupidity and your surroundings by grabbing a hold of them! That’s right! You can now grab a hold of your enemies with your free hand, taking them hostage, and them torture them to death! Most of the time when you have an enemy in your arms like that, you will most likely want to “steal” the weapon they are holding and kill them in the harshest way possible! 90% of the time you’ll end up simply decapitating your enemy as you steal his or her weapon, and it’s quite cool to see!

If you don’t feel the need or the desire to steal your enemy’s weapon and just want a quick way to get rid of him or her, you can perform a “monkey toss” and simply throw them behind you and into a never ending chasm to their death! It all really depends on how you want to approach fighting in this game. If you want to challenge yourself, you won’t take the easy way out like that all the time, but if you are somewhat impatient and don’t feel like dealing with all the regular fighting that you can do, that is one of your better options.

Now as for your surrounding environment when you have one weapon, you can do a good number of things.

If the environment around you has any kind of narrow poles or columns that you can grab a hold of, you will be able to do just that, swing around them and take out your enemies that way! You can either swing around one with your sword in a helicopter fashion, or your can perform a swinging double kick maneuver with a sword slice at the very end, both work quite nicely!

You also have the same maneuvers that you had in Sands of Time with regards to walls that you can do here. Vaulting off the walls to drive yourself in your enemies, knocking them over, running up a wall and performing an insanely acrobatic maneuver utilizing that, the choice is yours.

Dual Weapons/Dual Danger: This time around, the Prince is able to wield 2 weapons at once. You can either find your secondary object of pain on the various weapons racks you will encounter throughout the game, or you can simply take them from the enemies that you fight, both work fine.

With double the weapons comes double the pain that you can dish out! The combos are virtually endless with what you can do with dual weapons, and it would be tedious and unnecessary to describe every single one. But if you do have dual weapons, anything you can think of, you can pretty much do. The whirlwind/helicopter attacks, focusing on trying to fool your enemies with targeting different areas of his or her body, ANYTHING. It is obvious that dual weapons will give you a much easier time at defeating your enemies, whether it ends up being one hit kills or simply clearing out the area around you to give yourself some breathing room, it’s just so much fun!

Now based on the whole experience, it’s very easy to make the judgment that the best part of using your dual weapons is how you can utilize them when you run up walls. Now you can utilize both single and double weapons when running up walls, but if you do it with duals, you will have a much better chance at taking out your enemies than otherwise.

Basically the best thing you can do when running up a wall is the attack that makes the Prince land on his feet at the end of his fall and doing a 360 attack that can virtually take off the “heads” of every enemy in the vicinity or actually “splitting” them in half! Sure it might be a bit grotesque at times, but hey, whatever works works right?