Prince of Persia: Warrior Within landed in 2004 as the follow-up to a game that had, a year earlier, made the platformer feel lush and light. The Sands of Time was colorful, nimble, forgiving. Warrior Within is none of those things. Ubisoft Montreal built the sequel around a darker, grittier theme, a fortress that folds past into present, and a combat system that hands the Prince two blades instead of one. It is harder, uglier, more ambitious than its predecessor, and for long stretches it works.
“You cant change your Fate! No Man Can..”
The Beast That Keeps the Timeline
The story picks up seven years after The Sands of Time, after the Prince reversed his release of the Sands in the palace of Azad. He is hunted by a being called the Dahaka, a guardian of the Timeline whose mission is to ensure he dies as he was meant to. The old wise man gives him the rule without softening it: whoever releases the Sands of Time must die. The Prince escaped his fate, and the Dahaka will not let that stand.
His answer is the Island of Time, where the Empress of Time first created the Sands. He means to stop their creation entirely, an act he believes will appease the Dahaka. A battle at sea against a force led by a mysterious woman in black capsizes his ship, and the Prince washes ashore unconscious.
He wakes, chases the woman in black through the Empress of Time’s fortress, and follows her into a portal that throws them both into the past. He saves a woman named Kaileena from being killed by the woman in black, whose name is Shahdee. Kaileena cannot grant him an audience with the Empress, who is busy preparing to create the Sands, so she tells him how to unlock the door to the throne room instead.
A Fortress You Walk Through Twice
Warrior Within is a 3D platformer centered on exploration and melee combat, much as its predecessor was. The difference is the shape of the world. The level design revolves around navigating treacherous environments with parkour and freerunning-styled moves, but unlike The Sands of Time the game world is highly nonlinear. Players return to already visited locations several times from various directions, often traversing time portals to visit the same places in the present and the past.
That structure is the best idea in the game. An obstacle impassable in one era opens a route in the other, and the fortress becomes a puzzle you solve across centuries rather than rooms you clear in sequence. The Garden Tower and the Mechanical Tower serve as locks on the throne room door, and activating their mechanisms means working both timelines at once. It is demanding, occasionally confusing, and far more interesting than a straight corridor of set pieces would have been.
Secret areas reward the detour. Exploring them yields additional health points and unique weapons, and the chain culminates in a weapon capable of inflicting damage on the Dahaka, which unlocks the game’s canonical ending. That is a real incentive rather than a collectible tally, and it gives the backtracking a purpose beyond padding.
Two Blades, Borrowed and Thrown
Combat is where Warrior Within makes its loudest changes. The Prince can wield two weapons at a time, steal his enemies’ weapons, and throw them. His repertoire of combat moves has been expanded into varying strings that allow players to attack enemies with more complexity than was possible in the previous game.
The system preserves aspects of the prior game’s dual wield melee combat while introducing new ones. The Sands of Time designates a sword as the Prince’s primary weapon and the Dagger of Time as his secondary. Warrior Within makes the sword his mandatory primary weapon and requires him to obtain a secondary weapon from fallen enemies or weapon racks to use one at all.
The design pushes a free-flow fighting style. The idea is to use the environment, the secondary weapons scattered through the fortress, and the Prince’s own acrobatic abilities to dispatch enemies with ease and aggression. Graphic violence effects can be toggled in the in-game options menu, a sensible concession for a game whose darker tone is not a marketing line but a mechanical fact.
Sand Powers and the Water Rule
The rewind, slow-down, and speed-up powers from The Sands of Time return. Warrior Within adds a new one: a circular wave of sand that knocks down all surrounding enemies and damages them. It is the kind of crowd-control tool the previous game never needed, because the previous game never threw this many bodies at the Prince at once.
The Dahaka encounters are the game’s other structural idea. These are episodes where the Prince is chased by the Dahaka and must quickly navigate trap-ridden hallways to reach safety. They are not fights. They are escapes, and they invert the power fantasy the rest of the game trades on.
The Prince discovers the Dahaka cannot pass through water. That single rule turns every chase into a route-finding problem, and it is the cleanest piece of design in Warrior Within. You are not asked to be stronger than the thing hunting you. You are asked to be faster and to know where the water is.
Kaileena Is the Empress
The fortress run ends in the throne room, where the Prince learns Kaileena is the Empress of Time herself. She has foreseen in the Timeline that the Prince will kill her, and she has decided to attempt to defy her fate, just as the Prince is doing. A battle ensues, the Prince proves victorious, and he kills her and returns to the present.
What follows is the most dramatic twist in the Prince’s life, and he starts believing the priest who told him he cannot change his fate. He is not going to give up that easily. That refusal is the spine of the game, and it is also, depending on how you read the ending, the setup for a sequel that has to reckon with what he just did.
Revelations and Two Mobile Versions
Warrior Within launched for GameCube, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, and Xbox. It is the fifth main installment in the Prince of Persia series. A port for the PlayStation Portable developed by Pipeworks Software, titled Prince of Persia: Revelations, was released in 2005. Two mobile versions were published by Gameloft for J2ME and iOS in 2004 and 2010, respectively. Due to issues with the in-game menu, the iOS version was temporarily pulled from the App Store for two weeks.
That iOS episode is worth a note because it is the kind of thing that gets lost in a series history. A menu bug took a finished port off sale for two weeks. It is not a scandal and it is not a design failure of the console game, but it is a reminder that Warrior Within was pushed onto every platform that would take it, sometimes before it was ready.
What Holds Up and What Does Not
The nonlinear fortress is the part that lasts. Time portals that let you approach the same room from the present and the past are not a gimmick bolted onto a platformer; they are the reason the platformer exists in this form. The Dahaka chases give that structure stakes, and the water rule gives them a solution.
The combat expansion is real but uneven. The free-flow style the game is chasing depends on the environment cooperating, and when it does the Prince moves like something out of a stunt reel. When it does not, you are managing a weapon you picked off a corpse.
The darker tone is the weakest of the big swings. Warrior Within trades the colorful palette of The Sands of Time for grit, and grit is easier to render than character. The Prince’s new finishing moves and the toggleable violence are consistent with the story being told, but they do not make the story better. They make it louder.
Key facts
- Release year: 2004
- Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
- Publisher: Ubisoft Entertainment
- Platforms: Xbox, Nintendo GameCube, PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 2, iOS
- Genre: Platform, hack and slash/beat ’em up, adventure
- Mode: Single player
- Perspective: Third person
- PSP port: Prince of Persia: Revelations, 2005, Pipeworks Software
- Mobile versions: Gameloft, J2ME 2004, iOS 2010
- iOS delisting: two weeks, in-game menu issues
- Score: 8 of 10
Warrior Within is a sequel that chose difficulty over charm and mostly earned the trade. The Island of Time is a better setting than it gets credit for, the past-and-present traversal is the series’ most underrated mechanic, and the Dahaka is one of the few pursuers in games that changes how you move rather than how hard you hit. The combat is overstuffed and the tone is trying too hard, and neither of those problems is small. But the game has a real idea at its center: a man who broke time and is being hunted by the thing that keeps it, running through a fortress that lets him argue with his own history. That is more than most 2004 action games attempted, and it is why Warrior Within still reads as ambitious rather than merely edgy. 8 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
