PSP

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

Rival Swords on the PSP is as fully featured as its console counterparts, and it offers a lot of extra content to boot. While not necessarily enough to attract fans of the series who already fought through Two Thrones, the new levels and multiplayer functionality work well to pad out the package and improve upon an already great game. Even with the quirks in its presentation, Rival Swords will have no problems pleasing fans of both Prince of Persia and action adventures.

Prince Of Persia : Rival Swords est un portage honnête de son grand frère de salon, mais dans tous les domaines, il s'avère sensiblement inférieur à son modèle. Logiquement moins beau, moins évident à prendre en main, il n'en reste pas moins un excellent titre d'action/plates-formes que les néophytes en la matière devraient apprécier à sa juste valeur. Les fidèles du Prince en revanche n'auront pas grand intérêt à faire l'investissement.

Prince of Persia: Rival Swords is a good handheld retelling of The Two Thrones. The atmospheric storyline remains intact and the game includes all the fun and engaging platforming and combat sequences of the console-based titles. Additionally, there is new content -- a real baffler since Ubisoft also made a Wii version that doesn't include it... and yet, there are drawbacks that keep the game from getting a higher score. Load times are still ever-present. The dual-analog nature of the Prince series has proved to problematic in the transition to Sony's handheld; you'll have to hold down the L button to control the camera and you can't move Prince around and change your viewing angle at the same time. And the game just runs slower, with a sometimes-sluggish framerate.

If you've never played Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones before, don't let Rival Swords be your first foray into the final chapter of the Prince's adventure. The addition of a few extra areas does not make up for the massive amount of flaws, both gameplay and graphical, that turns a fun game into a chore. There is very little here to recommend this title over any other version. It does feature multiplayer, but even that is marred by the unwieldy controls and unappealing graphics. Unless you have no other choice, pick up Two Thrones on a console instead of the PSP. You'll be much happier in the end.

So it's definitely not a great port, and the game would've been much better off if the effort that went into creating the new content had been put toward polishing the core game instead (the ad hoc multiplayer race mode, where you challenge another player to see who can move through certain areas quicker, hardly adds anything to the overall experience). But for those who want a title like this on the PSP, there's a game to love hidden down deep in here. You just have to dig through a bunch of technical obstacles to get to it.

It's a shame that Rival Swords turned out like this, because it does almost everything right - great gameplay in healthy doses, a bountiful supply of extras, additional exclusive gameplay, the list goes on. But none of that really matters when the core of the game is destroyed due to the poor optimization. If you really want to play Prince of Persia, stick to the home consoles; the portable version just doesn't cut it.