Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is the sequel to Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and it delivers a gameplay experience that qualifies it as one of the best video game sequels ever. Sands of Time captivated gaming audiences with the Prince’s acrobatic movements, complex puzzles, and stunning visuals. In Warrior Within, we are treated to more of the same and given some added features that truly spice up the gameplay. The game does an excellent job of making you use a healthy balance of intellect and swordsmanship; it is an adventure title that will require some timing, patience, and attention to detail, and those of you who appreciate such tactics and precision will get a lot out of this game.

Escaping Your Fate
Weary from the events that took place at the Sultan’s palace and on the run from an evil force of time, you embark on a quest to the Island of Time. There you intend to stop the Sands of Time from ever being created and escape your fate as the doomed soul that unleashed them. Before you reach the island, however, your ship is attacked and you are washed ashore with the wreckage. Now you must fight and maneuver your way around the island and through time. You won’t be playing straight through a one way campaign, though -- instead, you are provided with a map and objectives that require you to find your way around the many cliffs and corridors of the island in order to complete your mission. Every area on the island has a past and a present which entails you activating sand portals that take you between the two timelines. Some areas can only be advanced through in a certain part of the timeline. For instance, a fallen pillar or cracked wall that may not have been damaged in the past now provides you with an opportunity to reach a different part of the island. Oftentimes you will find yourself revisiting areas of the map in both timelines to complete multiple tasks. The Prince regains the power to turn back time once he reaches the first portal, and that’s when the real fun begins.

New Traditions
Many times sequels are not well received because they either change too much from the first game or they don’t change enough. The hope is that a developer can do enough to keep the title fresh, yet recapture the style and eloquence that made the original so great. Ubisoft has done that here. Warrior Within gives you more of the same great fighting style, daredevil acrobatics, and mind-racking puzzles that you loved in Sands of Time while introducing some welcome variances. An increased emphasis on fighting has brought some enjoyable new qualities to the gameplay. New to the Prince of Persia combat universe is the second weapon. You don’t have the dagger of time to accompany your main weapon anymore, so the Prince finds various swords, axes, etc. along the way that are dropped by enemies or found on weapons racks. Each one has its own strength and durability to distinguish it from other armaments. In addition, all second weapons can be thrown at opponents, and after prolonged use they degrade and wear out completely.

Enemies are handled very much the same way they were in the first game. Each has its own weakness to a move in the Prince’s repertoire and can be dispatched accordingly. The new wrinkle here is the large enemies that necessitate a little more imagination to be defeated. Rather than planting off their shoulders or slashing away you will have to bide your time and find an opportunity to strike. Boss battles are more frequent in Warrior Within than in Sands of Time, where you only really faced one final boss. The overall improvement and increased role of fighting in Warrior Within make it a more complete package than the first game. In Sands of Time, it felt like fighting sand creatures was just a stopgap to break up the monotony of weaving your way through obstacles and puzzles. However, Warrior Within calls upon you to use your fighting technique more often and in such varied instances that fighting really becomes an integral part of the game.

Are They Serious?
If you remember the traps and obstacles from the first game then you’ll know how to solve them in this one. Ubisoft was counting on that so they thought of ways to make them far more difficult. Veterans of the series became intimately familiar with how to bridge certain gaps and evade traps in Sands of Time, so in Warrior Within you’ll find that instead of having to deal with one or two traps at a time you’ll have to evade three or four simultaneously. Finding your way around won’t be as simple either, as paths of travel and means of getting up, over, and through are significantly less obvious than they were in the first game. As you get further into the game you will find areas that you have absolutely no clue how to get through and you will try some crazy, desperate things to get to the next area. In such cases, it’s best to be patient and look around. Vision is very important and the solution is often simpler than you think. This all well and good, but when the Dahaka is chasing you, you are afforded no such luxuries.

That’s right, I said the Dahaka, the ten-foot-tall sand demon that you pissed off when you escaped your fate as the corpse who opened the Sands of Time. Dahaka chases are the best addition to this series. The Dahaka chasing you through an area makes you have to think fast about the obstacles that lie before you, because if the Dahaka catches you, you’re dead. One of my all-time favorite gaming moments is when the Dahaka bursts out of a wall just after you had finished running across it. Some of the obstacles in the chases become so complex that when you can see them coming you ask yourself, are they serious?! You generally won’t see the right path until the last possible second and you have to react immediately.

Persian Ambience
The atmosphere in this game is outstanding. It carries over some of the elements of the first game and tweaks them to perfection in the sequel. The pristine, eye-catching environments fill you with a sense of decadence and wonder that match what you felt when you played the first game. Graphically, it meets what your expectations would be for an Xbox game and it immerses you in its world within the first ten minutes you pick up the controller. Prince of Persia jumps from a "T" for Teen ESRB rating for Sands of Time to an "M" for Mature in Warrior Within. It carries a darker tone to it than the first game and the Prince looks and sounds like a battle-tested warrior as opposed to the "acrobatic kid" from Sands of Time. You’ll even notice a bit of cursing in the dialogue and your foes shedding blood this time around. As for the audio, the soundtrack for this game uses a harmonic mix of rock instrumentals with a distinct middle-eastern flare that combine to create some fantastic gameplay tunes. That’s Godsmack’s "I Stand Alone" you’re hearing when the Dahaka is chasing you.

The Bottom Line
The satisfaction of completing a deep story mode is well worth the hours of work you will need to put into it. Trying to give you an idea of what Warrior Within is like if you haven’t tried it is difficult, considering it’s fairly incomparable to anything else out there. Fans of the first game will love this one just as much if not more. Ubisoft did a great job re-igniting the Prince of Persia universe with Sands of Time and they did a great job following up with Warrior Within. They took a great game and successfully brought it to the next level. I can’t wait to see what they will do with the next installment in the series.