The Prince of Persia The Two Thrones Review

By Gary Kearney

Can you get too much of a good thing? Well I don't think so and as part of my evidence I point to Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones for the Gamecube. Brought to us by Ubisoft, The Two Thrones is a great game that is full of things we have seen in the previous games but, as luck would have it, those were great games also.

Ubisoft stumbled on a gold mine of fun starting with the first Prince of Persia a few years back and with the release of two sequels this has become one of the best series (up there in my book with with other series like Splinter Cell, Halo, and GTA) for the current generation of video games. The story is an interesting continuation of the Sands of Time and does a nice job of bringing all of the games together. Personally I always get a little bit confused with games and movies that play around with time and often end up scratching my head wondering how the universe didn't implode upon itself with all of the funky time twisting. But the Two Thrones wrapped up everything nicely and didn't leave me too confused...which is saying quite a lot.

Sure, Sands of Time and Warrior Within were both Prince of Persia games but one was a little “Disney” like while the other leaned toward “Tarantino”. Now with The Two Thrones Ubisoft shows that it listened to gamers and combined the personality of Sand of Time with the cool combat of Warrior Within and delivers a fine game.

The Two Thrones starts with the Prince cruising back with Kaileena to Babylon only to be met with a city on fire and a whole bunch of flaming arrows. Within moments your ride is exploding and there are a bunch of ugly guys running off with you gal. This was probably not the homecoming that the Prince was expecting...then again considering all he's been through maybe it was. I won't go much more into the story as part of the enjoyment of all the PoP games has been seeing what happens next.

There are several strengths to The Two Thrones ranging from the good graphics, wonderful animations, and great sound. I'll get into each of those in a moment but first a bit about the control, which is once again right on. Naturally the Prince can do his usually gravity-defying moves but the big addition this time around is something called speed kills. This involves a little stealth where the Prince must sneak behind an enemy. Once close enough the screen blurs a bit this is your clue to press the Y button to being the attack. During the attack the Prince's dagger will flash white and this is another clue to press the B button...get it right and you have one dead bad guy, mess up and your advantage is over and you go into the normal fighting mode.

As you may know, The Two Thrones introduces the Dark Prince which is the alter-ego to the Prince. If you ever saw Animal House, think of the Dark Prince as the little devil on your shoulder. The Dark Prince haunts the Prince's thoughts and finally is able to actually take over his body as well. The Dark Prince is much stronger and thus has a few different types of attacks that takes this into account. He also has a weapon called a Daggertail which is kind of a long chain that can be used to...well, really hurt people. It can also be used to get across areas that would normally be uncrossable. As the Dark Prince your health is continually draining and when you drink water you turn back into the Prince. There are certain areas that can only be passed as the Dark Prince.

As with the past games, The Two Thrones is a nice game to see and the smoothness of the animations are like butter...or some thing that is really smooth. The environments are very detailed and there always seems to be something going on in the background that helps bring about the sense of life. One thing that did happen while I was playing should be brought out. I was watching a battle between a few people going on below where I was standing. The battle was pretty much nothing more than a few moves repeating themselves. Through some odd bug in the game I was able to fall down to where this “battle” was taking place and not die. So now I'm at a place where there is no way out watching a battle that will never end and feeling a little like Sisyphus. That was lame. Not lame is the sound that includes some nice voice acting. Interesting and often assuming are the conversations that the Prince will have with himself and the Dark Prince.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 83%.  While maybe not as awe-inspiring as the first time we saw the Prince, The Two Thrones is a great way to end this series.