PlayStation Hardware & Games

Video: 4
Sound: 4
Gameplay: 5

Imagine coming home after an unexpected, prolonged absence. With you is the love of your life, whom you met while on your trip. As you turn the corner onto your street, you see flames rising from your house, and your dog is nowhere to be found. Replace "house" with "kingdom" and " your dog" with "everyone you have ever known," and you have the beginning to Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones.

The third installment of the Prince of Persia series, The Two Thrones takes everything that was good about its predecessors, Sands of Time and Warrior Within, and continues with an engaging story that keeps you interested from moment to moment. For those unfamiliar with the game format, The Two Thrones is a combination of puzzle solving and combat. To get through each room, you must use your wit to find a path, possibly climbing poles, scaling and running along walls, jumping from ledge to ledge, or engaging in an involved combination of it all. At times, this is made easier with the landscape camera that allows for an alternate view of the room you are in, which might reveal the way through. But watch out—make one wrong move, and you could be hit by arrow traps and fall to your death.

Interspersed throughout the levels are baddies that you can fight hand to hand or, if you're lucky, catch by surprise and "speed kill." While there is no tutorial level to show how to accomplish this, there is an option to turn on tutorial messages that appear at the bottom of the screen that indicate when you can attempt a particular action. This allows you to get right into the action of the game and not feel completely lost.

Where The Two Thrones differs from the earlier games is with the emergence of the Dark Prince, the tortured side of your soul. At key moments throughout the game, your body will transform as your darker side comes to light. The Dark Prince comes with a different weapon, the super-cool daggertail that you can use like Indiana Jones' whip to swing across large gaps or smack your enemy across the face for damage. The Dark Prince also comes with an insatiable appetite for carnage. In fact, if you don't continue killing things (or finding special sand in containers), you die. So keep those bodies piling up.

The graphics for The Two Thrones look fantastic. The backgrounds capture an exotic majesty, especially when the sun is shining. The picture is only available as 4:3, unfortunately, but there is a progressive option if you have component cables for your PS2. If you don't, they are worth the money. Progressive drastically increases the smoothness of the picture, especially during the wonderful cinematography of the cut scenes. The Dolby Pro Logic II sound is a great fit for the video. The music occasionally kicks in to get your heart pumping for upcoming action and helps to draw you even further into the world of Prince of Persia. The mix is masterfully done, with dialogue in another room echoing throughout the halls and changing spatial placement as you turn left and right. While the dialogue acting can tend to be on the hammy side, it doesn't detract much from the overall enjoyment of the story.

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones continues the enjoyable gameplay of the first two in the series. That is not to say knowledge of the first two games is needed to take pleasure in The Two Thrones. You might, in fact, find yourself scouring the used bins in search of Sands of Time and Warrior Within to continue your stay in Persia. In the end, who could blame you?