The Prince of Persia is well known for being a great action adventure series. From the fighting to the Prince’s acrobatics, Prince of Persia does not fail in entertaining gamers for hours. Warrior Within, the second installment in the Prince of Persia series, does not drop the ball in this tradition of great entertainment. The events of the first game have come back to haunt the Prince, as he tries to overcome his destined death. After disrupting the timeline in The Sands of Time, a creature called the Dahaka seeks to rectify this disruption by eliminating the source: The Prince.

Death-Defying Action

The best thing about the Prince of Persia series tends to be the action. The same is true of Warrior Within. The action is well-paced and makes this game a lot of fun. The Prince performs his trademark acrobatic moves that always make these games so much fun to play. With the Prince you can flip, jump, wall-run, somersault, and leap your way to victory.

Like The Sands of Time, you have to balance across poles and narrow ledges, run along walls, spring from the wall, mid-run, and flip off of walls and over enemies’ heads. This time around, there is more difficulty in these staple acrobatics. Enemies sometime block your way on ledges and can take you down with one swipe of a blade. Running along walls can also cause problems as now the enemies can camp out on the wall like a Spiderman wannabe, in the case of the dog-like enemies. In the case of the human enemies, they may laze about on the opposite ledge until you get close, and then strike you down in one seeming-unfair blow.

Luckily the walls don’t serve just as places for untimely death by lazy villains. It is very rare that enemies don’t have companions and when they do, they are huge, armored, and generally don’t need comrades because of being so large and armor-covered. For the non-large, armor-covered enemies, they assemble in packs. Unlike The Sands of Time where they gathered in packs as well, the enemies actually may attack more than one at a time. This forces you to have to strategize when fighting. Mashing the square and triangle buttons is a good way to get taken down pretty quickly. To add insult to injury (literally), they will attack from the back, and kick you while you’re down (or more like stab you while you’re down.) The red ninja-looking women most often use these methods, and tend to be the more difficult and frustrating enemies to defeat. Using the environment, like wall switches that activate spikes in the floor, or springing off of walls to attack are good ways to regain the upper hand.

The acrobatics are taken up a notch as you alternate between thinking out the course carefully in order to reach your objective, and fast-paced chases. The Dahaka is a creature that is invincible until the end of the game, so any encounters with it involve running away. This involves a new kind of urgency in the game as you must escape the Dahaka amongst all of the traps of the Island of Time. This makes the pace of the game more variable, and makes things more exciting than the normal course of fighting and climbing and dodging to the next objective.

The fighting of Warrior Within is a joy in and of itself (if you have some violent tendencies). Differing from the previous game in the series, hitting specific button combinations will perform special moves. Every now and then, performing the special moves triggers some pretty cool finish animations. You can split an enemy in half, lop off a head and a few other bloody finishes that contribute to this not being for the kiddies. While graphic, these finishes add to what makes fighting so satisfying in Warrior Within. After all, if you risk getting knocked on your back because you wanted to show off with some special move, then you want something to show for it, and it had better not be an enemy cleanly dissolving into oblivion.

The fighting and finishing moves are executed very well, and the controls tend to be pretty responsive. Unfortunately, there does tend to be some lag in the game now and then, especially when there are a fair number of enemies on screen. Fortunately this lag doesn’t occur too often to be truly hindering, but it can be a little annoying.

Graphic Violence

The Prince has come a long way since Sands of Time. He has a battle hardened look to him that really suits a game with a title like Warrior Within. The Persian warrior look is hands down a better look than the Prince Ali, boyishly handsome look of he first game in the trilogy. You can truly appreciate the new look in the cutscenes, especially. Unfortunately, the cuts to the cutscenes tend to be a bit choppy and stilted. Outside the fully rendered cutscenes, he still looks good, but the modeling can look a bit smoother in some places. The other two significant human characters don’t fare as well. Their design is pretty good, but they tend to not be as well executed. The character Kaileena’s eyes tend to look a bit dull and lifeless throughout the game. The environments, on the other hand, are very well made. The design is very well done and thorough, and the execution held up very well too. However, the actual environments have nothing on the concept illustrations that you can unlock throughout the game. These are fantastic. All in all, the graphics faired pretty well.

Clanging Metal

The sound of Prince of Persia is great. The music fits the game perfectly and the cuts and fades between music faired better than the cuts in the graphics. The voice acting was very well acted and the voices chosen for each character suited them perfectly. There are no monotones in here, everything has expression and dynamic. The Dahaka’s voice is really pretty awesome, and it’s pretty cool how you can figure out what he’s saying if you rewind time and time it right. Beyond the voices, the sound effects are flawless. Especially nice are the sound effects for any of the time-related moves. Rewinding time, slowing down time, and any sound effect involving the sands of time sounds great and is very well engineered.

Ruthless Combat

The most fun to be had in Warrior Within is the fighting. The finishing moves add a whole new aspect to the whole experience of combat. Learning new special moves and then being able to execute them at will against your enemies gives you a nice little battle euphoria. Figuring out certain enemies’ weak points and then being able to break out your arsenal of special moves to use against them—all while being outnumbered—makes you want to throw your controller down like a football, do the equivalent of a touchdown dance, and strut around like you’re the shiznit.

Plasmafactor

Unfortunately, that one key factor that makes or breaks a game this time breaks this otherwise really good game. Fortunately it does not break the game all the way down but it is still a major break. The fact is that this game has a huge game glitch. Not a freeze-up-so-you-have-to-restart-the-PS2 glitch, but a start-the-game-over-cause-you’re-not-gonna-work-around-this kind of glitch. When you get to the very end of the game, you may or may not encounter this glitch. Basically the time portal that you need in order to face the final boss doesn’t work. And it won’t. No matter how many times you leave the room and come back in, or restart the PS2. The only solution is to start the game over and hope that when you get to the very end again that it won’t happen again. Supposedly you can decrease your chances of encountering this glitch by not saving too often, but who wants to deal with that kind of extra work of making sure not to make a mistake and die as you haven’t saved the game for a while? No, no, I’m afraid this flaw is just inexcusable.

Flawed Victory

Despite its few imperfections and its one glaring fault, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is still a success and manages to uphold the Prince of Persia name with dignity. This is a great game with a great soundtrack and voice acting. The environments are well done and the extras add a nice touch. The combat and gameplay in Warrior Within do not fail in entertaining, so this game still comes out on top, nicked and bruised, albeit, but still victorious.