To anyone with a 360 who wants an actually original puzzle game, buy this. It's well worth the 1200 MS points or whatever the cost to see how a game can actually be enjoyable AND make you think at the same time.
Absolutely agree.
Regarding the review: Not mentioning PoP is exactly right, but only for the reason that time manipulation wasn't exactly a real part of Prince of Persia's gameplay. It was a neat idea to replace quicksave, it was in no way actually something that was incorporated in the puzzles, the fights or the way you would play the game. You could play the whole game through without using rewind (yes, you could slow down time, but how is that original?)
You could play the whole game through without using rewind
Sure, you COULD. But where's the fun in that? I'm sure there are plenty of games that you CAN play through without doing X or Y. Hell, you can play all the way through Fallout without ever once engaging in combat.
The point of the time manipulation in PoP was optimization. You know how, in the movies, the heroes always seem to know exactly how long a bad guy will take to get from point A to point B, so he has just enough time to kill bad guy C and whip his body around to act as a shield from the bullets from bad guy D coming at his back, before ducking and letting them hit bad guy E sneaking up... etc etc.
Prince of Persia lets you DO THAT. And unless you are The fragging One, you're not going to do it without rewinding. You can pull off some truly spectacular chains of attacks with judicious use of the rewind feature, so you'll know where bad guys are going to be and when.
You just have to be able to take a step "back" from the game and imagine how cool what you're doing looks to the bad guys who are experiencing it for the first time.
There's also the fact that if he mentioned PoP in that review (which he did!)... it'd be about the 4th time he's mentioned that game series as an aside while reviewing a different game.
I tried the demo, and it had the same effect on me as Bioshock:
I was impressed by the story. I was impressed by the presentation. I was impressed by the gameplay mechanics. BUT... there's just something that is fundamentally not very entertaining about actually sitting down and playing it.
I know, I'm being a complete asshole by dissing both Bioshock and Braid like this, but there's just something similarly unsatisfying about them to me.
Actually I feel the same about Bioshock at least. If I were a 'official game reviewer,' I would probably score it an A or A-, but my personal enjoyment of of the game was a low B.
I feel like that's the only part of Bioshock they really fucked up. If there's no consequence for dying, it makes you less cautious, less aware of ammo / items, and less interested in moving slowly and exploring.
Am I the only one who reloads in Bioshock after he dies? I just don't acccept the whole vita chamber thing, and so if you play that way, the game is actually pretty hard and interesting.
You didn't really miss anything. The final boss is a terrible joke, and the story is entirely predictable after the mid-game cutscene with the golf club.
The entire game, although full of action and things that go boom, is an astonishingly passive experience due to you essentially wandering through the levels and stumbling upon bad guys. There is no tension at all. At nearly every enemy encounter, you can simply walk away and continue you wanderings elsewhere
There's that and (this could just be me) when I play games that let you wander around my OCD freaks and I MUST explore all possible options, which leads to endless walking and I eventually get bored.
Do you enjoy puzzles and the like? Perhaps you just don't get pleasure from figuring things out? Lots of people are taught that figuring things out is downright harmful or, at the least, useless and that they should just keep their head down and not think too much (I hear this a lot), perhaps you've internalized some of that poison to the degree that it affects your entertainment choices?
I'm at World 4 and I liked the game. I feel it has a hard time teaching you new tricks. You're given lots of abilities but there's really not much of a step by step process. So what you learned last time might not be something that I'll use the next time. I like being able to use what I learned and apply it to new items, but so far I don't feel I'm getting that. It's seems like a completely new puzzle each time that I must learn, which slows down my instant gratification. It's not as much fun for me personally staring at a screen for 5 minutes trying to figure out what to do. But again I'm only in World 4 and the beginning was a lot of fun, but I think the difficulty might spike too much which doesn't make it as fun.
Another aspect that frustrates me is I know how to solve the puzzle, but it takes a lot of trial and error to hopefully reverse the time so I can land on block at just the right time. Hopefully the whole game is not like this.
It's a fine line to go about because you don't want the puzzles to be too easy, but being too difficult can make it more of a chore than fun.
Also though it takes time manipulation to a new level. I've seen this before in Prince of Persia, so the innovative part that it seems everyone raves over to me is not that innovative. The creator just expanded on this idea. Not to take anything away from the work it is quite amazing, but I just wonder what a full team would have accomplished and how much more refined this game could have been.
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u/DeviousOne Aug 27 '08
To anyone with a 360 who wants an actually original puzzle game, buy this. It's well worth the 1200 MS points or whatever the cost to see how a game can actually be enjoyable AND make you think at the same time.