Prince of Persia: Revelations (PSP) review "Even though the game sometimes looks like a bad Kung Fu film (audio clips for scripted events aren't properly synched), out-of-control glitches are NOT what make Revelations an irritating experience. The atrocious framerate, inopportune loading, and horrible controls accomplish that on their own."

You know your product has problems when it's so glitchy that people create message board topics asking, "Will this game damage my PSP?"

For the record, I have no reason to believe that Prince of Persia: Revelations could possibly damage your PSP, unless you cram it into the system backwards or forcibly eject it like in Half-Life 2's SMOD mod.

In fact, my experience with the game was pretty much glitch-free. Therefore, I can't vouch for the authenticity of claims like "The Empress of Time disappeared into the ground and couldn't be hurt, but she kept laughing at me from deep within her impregnable, subterranean shelter" or that famous tale of "My sword harmlessly passed through the enemies' bodies, but that's okay because they were frozen and couldn't move anyway".

So don't believe the hype — even though the game sometimes looks like a bad Kung Fu film (audio clips for scripted events aren't properly synched), out-of-control glitches are NOT what make Revelations an irritating experience. The atrocious framerate, horrible controls, and inopportune loading accomplish that on their own.

Revelation One: Because of the lag between button press and blade swing, sword-fights are a hell of a lot less entertaining than the fast-paced combat present in other 3D action games. I could blame the PSP's architecture for the unresponsive controls and horrible framerate, but smart developers would know I'd be lying. (Hi Chris!)

Revelation Two: I jumped off a wall and landed on the ground. Not a long jump, mind you. I was so glad that I had landed on firm footing instead of falling into a pit... and then my happiness turned to sorrow as the prince crumpled into a heap. I got to watch his life slowly ebb away, and I couldn't even do anything about it, because I didn't yet have access to the time-reversing Sands.

Revelation Three: While leaping across a pit I had leaped across five or six other times without any problems, the game stopped to load... MID-JUMP. It's extremely nerve-wracking to begin leaping across a giant chasm, only to have a yellow "now loading" symbol appear in the corner while the fragile prince hangs in mid-air like Michael Jordan. Assuming Michael Jordan made a habit of leaping across bottomless pits, that is.

But enough griping. This incarnation of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within isn't just a screwed-up rehash of the console original. Ubisoft actually added some lengthy new puzzles, and they're appropriately tricky. Since it's a PSP game, whenever I got stuck, I could turn the system off and resume play later, at the exact spot where I stopped! The only problem was that, after shutting down the PSP... I never really felt like turning it on again.

You know your product has problems when paying customers don't want to play it. That's Prince of Persia: Revelations.

//Zig

Staff review by Zigfried (August 13, 2007) Zigfried likes writing about whales and angry seamen, and often does so at the local pub.