Prince of Persia: Rival Swords

Some of you will remember Prince of Persia from his original adventure in the late 80s, which appeared on almost every console and home computer system. A platform adventure like no other, you guided the slickly-animated Prince through a castle filled with traps, and fought against guards with your sword.

Rival Swords is the first Prince of Persia game to appear on the Wii console, and is essentially th same game as Prince of Persia: Two Thrones, which is available on Xbox and Playstation. The plot is mostly nonsense that won’t make a great deal of sense unless you’ve played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and its sequel Warrior Within, but all you really need to know is that an evil dude has conquered the world and it’s your job to sort him out.

As with previous PoP games the Prince is an acrobatic chap, capable of some amazing gravity-defying feats. This is where a large amount of the fun lies in playing Rival Swords. Controlling the prince is both easy and enjoyable as he runs along walls and somersaults over enemies. He’s also got a few new tricks in the form of the ‘Dark Prince’. Having been infected with magical sand the princes personality splits at certain points during the game, and you get to control the brutal ‘Dark Prince’ wielding razor-edged chains.

The Wii controls work very nicely here, but Rival Swords problem is that it fails to offer anything new. If you’ve already played Two Thrones there’s no reason at all to buy this, and if you haven’t you’re still going to be slightly shocked by the relatively  poor visuals, which are now years out of date.

Verdict:

Rival Swords is plenty is an entertaining platform adventure with lots of puzzles and action to keep you occupied. Sadly it doesn’t offer anything new for Wii console gamers aside from the control method.