Bloody Chunky Mover

I should start by saying that I had every bias and high expectation when I unpacked this baby. I couldn't wait to rejoin my pal the Prince as he ran, jumped, hacked, and slashed his way out of every situation. Wow was I naive.

Before I get into the myriad reasons that this title didn't fill all of my expectations, I should definitely put out the positive aspects (and there are many).

One of my worries was that the graphics would shift in a completely wrong direction for the title. Thankfully, my fears were unfounded. Red Orb has done a commendable job as far as the game looks. They center in perfectly on the dark, gloomy, dungeons aspect of the POP games while maintaining some breathtaking scope in the larger levels. Color schemes are for the most part brilliant though solidly theme-based (i.e. there are definitive "green levels", "blue levels", etc.). Weapons have trails, water is believable, the physics are a bit tweaked to give the Prince the vertical hops of an NBA star, but this only opens up the worlds even more.

On to the gameplay. POP3D is everything the old games were in the puzzles aspect, making the shift to 3D environments with style. It's quite apparent that much time was used to think up creative ways to make use of the Prince's new freedom and range of movement. Puzzles are tricky, but perhaps not as frustrating in actual difficulty as the old puzzles (although they are more difficult in a different sense, to be mentioned later).

The fighting engine is quite similar to the old style games as well, which is both good in some ways, but also disappointing in others. The Prince is capable of entering a "Combat Mode", in which he draws his weapon and focuses on an enemy if one is present. Although this allows for very intricate and controlled blade combat, it also reduces the Prince's movement to a crawl. He has minimal sidestep, forward step/backward step range, but it's still frustratingly slow and limited. My vision (hey Red Orb, listen up!), was for a much freer/smoother combat engine in which the Prince could draw his weapon at any point (while maintaining the same point of view) and dance around his opponents while slicing them into tiny bits. Perhaps an optional enemy lock-on (a la Zelda 64), or tighter "Rune-esqe" idea would work better. Regardless, the combat (while it was cool to deflect and attack like the old games) was sadly 2D.

As far as weapons go, it was really really nice to have such a comparatively large arsenal. Besides a variety of blades (double butterfly, scimitar, etc.), the bow accommodates a number of nasty enchanted arrows that make life a little more interesting for your enemies.

As far as enemy AI goes, the opponents are decent enough and fun to fight with (via the locked in Combat Mode). Hitting them with various enchanted arrows is also quite entertaining.

On to the basic control of the Prince. While the guy's agile and can run/jump with the best of them, the Prince still has the semi-struggling movement that plagues a number of other games (Star Wars: The Phantom Menace). A free-roaming 3rd person movement with floating camera instead of the locked-cam 3rd person where you have to stop and turn to change directions (or even worse, move in huge awkward arcs while in a run) would be a great improvement. Admittedly though, the movement system was clearly designed for careful movement for perfect jumps and extremely cautious puzzle solving. Still, simply sticking a "walk" key in almost any control scheme would have worked out just fine.

The major faults are, as I said, the clunky controls and combat movement. A "dive" function wouldn't have been too bad either to help the Prince evade those pesky enemy archers. One last gripe that I have is the load time. If nothing else, it would have been nice if the bloody load indicator was the TOTAL load indicator instead of a cryptic bar that refilled itself a half dozen times over. Conversely, once you are in a given level you have virtually instant quick saving/loading, which is pretty nice.

All in all, this game wasn't the worst ever, but it could have used a little bit more work. I would strongly encourage Red Orb (or any other producer) to give this legendary title another try while concentrating on the fluidity of the Prince's movement. Not a must buy, but definitely worth a few run-throughs.