Hands On Preview: Prince of Persia: Warrior Within for the iPhone
Recently, Gameloft called press members to Paris to celebrate their 10th Anniversary and to take a look at some new iPhone and iPad games. This is our first of a series of hand on preview articles on what we saw there. Most of the games we saw should be out this month, with more new ones following right behind them. So it was at Le Cite de la Mode et du Design that we got our grubby little hands on this most anticipated iPhone game.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is a port of the game of the same title released for Xbox, PS2, GameCube, and the desktop PC. It was also renamed Prince of Persia: Relevations and released for the Sony PSP. The PSP version is the one I'm most familiar with and remember playing it for some time. Unfortnatly I could never finish the game as it kept locking up at some point near the end (bad UMD most likely). The cut scenes and voice overs are transferred straight from the console version.
For those not familiar with Prince of Persia games, this one, like most of the others, is a run/jump/shoot timing based platformer with a few puzzles thrown in. The 3D feature of this Prince of Persia game adds an extra complexity to the game that is a welcome addition from the older Prince of Persia games.
You progress through the levels, finding the travellable path and fighting enemies along the way. You will also encounter various puzzles as well. They may require special timing, special fighting moves, or a combination of the two. Luckily you can save your progress along the way at various points which will give you multiple chances to pass the more difficult puzzles.
The iPhone version contains all 24 of the chapters from the original game. While the whole game is there, the textures and polygons look to be scaled down just a bit for the iPhone. They still look lush and fantastic on the iPhone and the gameplay doesn't seem to have suffered at all. The game itself is smooth and looks fantastic on the device.
At first glance, the controls seem complex, but I had no problem getting used to them pretty quickly. The touch control pad on the left and a set of 4 context sensitive buttons on the lower right corner of the device.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within should be out sometime this month and I, for one, am really looking forward to finally being able to finish this game.
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