Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, the sword-slashing sequel to the groundbreaking Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The story of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within takes place several years after Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. In this new episode, the Prince is hunted by the Dahaka, the Guardian of Time. Indeed by rewinding time in the previous episode, the Prince has disrupted the timeline and the Dahaka is now after him to remove him permanently from the timeline. The Prince will die. It's not a question of "if" only a matter of "when". The Dahaka cannot be defeated. The Prince will die. To face his fate, the Prince will have to reach a dark and mysterious island, the place where the Sands of Time have been created. He's not a hero this time out, he's just a guy trying to save his own ass.

Coming out a year after Sands of Time, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within brings a lot of new features to the game, while keeping everything the fans loved from the previous Prince of Persia. The level design is as brilliant as that in Sands of Time - it may not be clear to you exactly how you will be getting up that balcony looming above you, but once you get moving, the pieces fall into place remarkably well...

The basic difference between Prince of Persia: Warrior Within and The Sands of Time is the fact that Warrior Within focuses a lot on the combat, as it let's you use the game's "free form fighting system" to create your own combos and dispose of enemies as you please. Now the Prince can throw weapons at enemies as well as wielding two swords at a time. The Prince's ability to single or dual-wield weapons makes the combat system even better because each of the dozens of temporary second weapons you can arm yourself with (they break after a few uses) open up new moves to try. The moves include a very cool flip over an enemy resulting in a gory decapitation and a hostage grab that results in the Prince cutting an enemy in half at the waist. Yeah, there's a lot more blood! I enjoyed the fighting much better in this game then the original.

But the combat is only a part of what makes this game great. Following along with the amazing environmental puzzles from Sands of Time, the developers created even more puzzles for the Prince in Warrior Within. The puzzles are really quite tricky and sometimes take a few attempts to work out how to solve them, and the levels are filled with barriers that look impossible. Puzzles often involve pulling levers to adjust movable objects to either connect together or create new ledges for leaping. Needless to say, the Prince's acrobat skills are most useful. You can run, jump, swing off ledges, run along walls and slide down tapestries. Mastering these moves is crucial for success because most of the levels require you to climb, swing or jump somewhere in order to progress. Again the Prince can use the "sands" to rewind time in order to succeed. Speaking as a gamer who hates jumping puzzles, it's odd that I love them so much in the Prince of Persia games.

Also the health upgrades are a little trickier to find, sometimes requiring you to remember a location and come back to it later. Also being unique from Sands of Time, you'll find the need to backtrack throughout some of the levels. Where as in Sands of Time, there was one straight path that you never crossed, Warrior Within has the Prince making multiple paths throughout the different levels and areas of the castle to reach his ultimate goal.

Overall, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is a game that all action/adventure gamers will enjoy. With the addition of new moves, longer gameplay and the incentive to find all the chest of extra features to the game, Warrior Within is a must purchase for fans who loved Sands of Time.

related links: Q&A, demo#1, demo#2, trainer+3, savegames

System requirements:
Minimum: 1GHz Pentium III, AMD Athlon or equivalent, 256MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3 or higher / ATI Radeon 7500 or higher / Intel 915G, DirectX 8.0 compatible sound device, 1.5 GB hard drive space for minimum installation

Recommended: 1.5 GHz Pentium 4, AMD Athlon or equivalent, 256MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 4 or ATI Radeon 9500, DirectX 8.0 compatible sound device, 2.2 GB hard drive space for full installation (CD), 3.5 GB hard drive space for full installation (DVD), Dual analog gamepad