Just fantastic. One of my favorite action-adventure games of the PS2 era, though not without its fairly major flaws.
Movement feels amazing, and chaining acrobatics through long parkour sections feels really awesome and fluid, just as good as it was back in the day. The combat, though, feels as bad as it [i]also[/i] was back in the day. There's no way around it, combat in this game is pretty bad. It's incredibly repetitive, and I hate when a game goes "actually the enemies are invincible if you just keep hitting them forever, you gotta do this one thing to permanently destroy them", and essentially 100% of the enemies in this game (except for minor annoyances like scarabs, birds and bats) are just like that, constantly getting up until you dagger-of-time them when they're down. The encounters also drag on and on for much longer than they should. For the entirety of the second half of the game, every time you think combat's over and more enemies spawn you will always think "oh seriously, [b]more[/b]?!". Lastly, another major problem regarding the combat is how your sidekick in the game can be killed by the monsters and that is an instant game over, so you're forced to babysit her during these portions. For the vast majority of the game this isn't really a problem, but it suddenly becomes your biggest issue during the final major mob fight in the game: the elevator section in the Tower of Dawn. I think I had 5 or so 'game overs' because they kept focusing her instead of me, and she dies incredibly fast when that happens.
The soundtrack is extremely good - there's no way you won't add some of these tracks to your playlist - and the visuals are awesome and aged very well. I did play using the "Fix Compilation" mod, which allows for widescreen and high resolutions, and the game looks just incredible.
The game's set pieces are mostly great. Most are hits, very few are complete misses, worst of all being the infamous "bring the crystal things to the top", with a very british soldier screaming instructions at you. That is just an awful segment and should've been completely reworked out outright removed, as it really brings down the game's flow real bad. On the other hand, the 'Halls of Learning' and the immediately after observatory segments are much, much better examples of puzzle segments that are neat and greatly integrated with both the Prince's move set and the style of the game as a whole.
Overall, it's a highly recommended "seamless adventure" type of game. Not sure if I'm uninformed, but I don't really know how to properly define these games where you go through a mostly continuous journey with no major breaks or time skips (think Half-Life games, Portal games, Resident Evil 4, Ico, Inside and so on). I really love this kind of game, and Prince of Persia - The Sands of Time most certainly stands out as one of the great ones. I just find it hard to believe a complete playthrough can go unscathed without its "okay, I'm [b]done[/b] with this combat" moment.
