Chris Burke gets hands on and communicates with the world…

ARABIAN NIGHTS IN: PRINCE OF PERSIA HANDS-ON

If you played the Sands Of Time series back on the PS2 you’ll know what to expect. Except you won’t. On the one hand the game elements are familiar – a 3D platformer involving acrobatic combat and death-defying leaps – but the look of the game has been completely reworked, and essentially the story ignores everything that went before it. The way developers Ubisoft explained it to ThreeSpeech is that this new chapter is like one of the 1001 Arabian Nights stories (to which Prince of Persia owes its themes); each story is a different take on the same popular myths and tales.

So, where your girly companion in Sands Of Time was a princess called Farah, in this one, that’s the name of your donkey. And it’s in the search for your mislaid and treasure-laden ass where the story begins. The first major thing you’ll notice is the graphics. Cell-shaded yet fully three-dimensional, it gives the game a striking and unique look. The backdrops are stunning – deep ravines, Persian palaces etc – and provide a suitable playground for your character’s high-flying antics.

You can scale just about anything that looks like it can be climbed. You can swing from poles, wall-run and leap like a salmon. It’s how you will traverse the terrain, and there are occasional magical devices that can be bounced off for extra distance too. The controls seem intuitive and you don’t have to be too precise in your positioning either. Lucky that, because it’s a long way down.

Here is where your new companion comes in, a foxy sorcery-using princess called Elika, and a major element in the gameplay. In the Sands Of Time trilogy, if you mis-timed a jump and fell to your death, you could rewind time and try it again. This time, Elika will catch you with her magic, or save your life in combat. She also plays a vital role in your progress through the game. Like circus acrobats, you can use each other to jump further by linking arms mid-air and somersaulting double the distance.

But from what we’ve seen it’s not all about platform jumping. There seem to be a good few enemies to scrap with too, and the combat system will allow you to make cool-looking attacks, jumping off walls and leaping over opponents. There’s a heavy reliance on counter-attacking which seems quite tricky to master, but worth it as it will be one of your strongest attacks.

Prince of Persia is out 5 December.