PoP: Sands of Time Playthrough (Part 1)

I've not played this game before, and am looking forward to doing so now. The only games in the series I've played are the original on PC and the PS3 game, though I never finished either of the two.

I can see right away where this game might have inspired the gameplay for similar titles in the future, as well as where it may have been inspired itself. Looking back at Tomb Raider and forward to Uncharted, this is fitting nicely in as a step along that evolutionary chain, though not without some tricks of its own.

I'm liking the narrative approach so far, and how when you die the Prince makes claims such as "Wait, that's not how it happened...", a fun method I've seen before and enjoy a lot. The cutscenes are enjoyable so far, even if the bad guy was very obviously the bad guy, no real twist with that one (evil mustache man is evil!).

The Prince is a very thirsty boy. Drinking water seems to be the primary, if not only, way to heal. Doesn't matter if it's in a fountain or just on the ground, he slurps that shit up. I came across what looks to be a permanent health upgrade and yet again - dude drinks up a handful of water from some strange fountain for that, too. Water IS the life-giver, I suppose. Combat is fun enough, though so far it seems that I'll be doing a lot of jumping over dudes to one-two combo them and then suck them into the dagger. There's definitely a lot of options however, what with the time dagger and all.

I reached my first puzzle and my first contention with the game. I'm really not a huge fan of big room-sized puzzle that require turning dials and placing things in some arbitrary order. The game prior to this point had been snappy, nice and fast-paced. The puzzle really slowed it to a crawl for the duration, and wasn't helped at all by the fact that there was some random guy with (for some reason) a cockney accent yelling at me the entire time.

Following that more platforming and then not too long after, the first boss - the Prince's father (or so it seems?). Turned to sand and then a ghoul thereafter, not a pleasant fate!

A good place to stop for the day, however. I'm about an hour or so into the game.