If there were one thing gamers unanimously took issue with while playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, it was the combat system. For the sequel, Ubisoft is prioritizing the action, so much so that this is now an action game. While the title will still incorporate the adventure elements that came hand-in-hand with the original's brilliantly told, intricate storyline and marvelously done locales, it will also more prominently and completely focus on the combat, or rather on a new style of combat.
Prince is not the lighthearted, glory seeking noble he once was. Much in the same way time ravaged the palace and adjacent yards of the original, it has ravaged him. This beaten, battered, darker, and more ruthless insomniac of a man is on a quest not to save the world or the ones he loves, but to save himself from a preordained death. Fate was upset with his escape from the palace and the cruel end of the Sands of Time, so it has summoned an unstoppable warrior to dismantle our hero limb-from-limb. Unfortunately for Fate, the Prince does not fall easy. For us, this means taking the greatest fighter of the land into a sea of evil and hacking down legions of merciless scum with a variety of weapons. More importantly, this new action game is not a simple hack and slash.
With the new action and sometimes adventure philosophy in mind, Ubi set out to perfect the toe-to-toe whacking, lopping, chopping, and slicing of the original by completely redoing it. The new game still features the very smooth animation and transitions that were found in the first, but has now instituted one of the most promising and fluid combat systems yet found in gaming. What Ubi proposes is a title where actions of any type can be strung together in an almost Tony Hawk-like fashion, creating chains of flowing death. What we've seen thus far looks terrific, but we still know very little.
Because of our lack of understanding, we threw 30 questions at Ubisoft to learn more about the game, the new direction, and the new combat system...
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