PC game review: A great comeback for a great Prince

"All right. I will admit I was not expecting that."
--The Prince

It was my idea to get Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones; I wanted to find out how he defeats the Bad Guys and reclaims the throne so evilly taken from him by an Osama bin Laden-lookalike. My brother bought the game and I fired it up, expecting a rich conclusion to the tale I'd been following (but not participating in so far, I'm afraid).
I got all that and more. A lot more.
T2T is extremely story-driven--it is a grand story of redemption and self-discovery, beginning with the Prince returning from the Island of Time with his new love Kaileena, the Empress of Time. The opening is a tutorial that gets you acquianted with the Prince's moves, and it's only a matter of time before you progress from getting him thrown off ledges and falling to his death to swinging through the streets of Babylon like Spiderman in the Big Apple. The PC's controls take some getting used to; it would've been easier with a gamepad, I will admit.
Spidey's got nothing on the Prince's new alter ego. Following his corruption by the Sands of Time, the ruthless and selfish part of his nature becomes personified in a playable Dark Prince that takes over his body at key points during the game. With a cool new weapon, you're well on your way to dishing it out to those big, bad sand monsters that have taken over your city. That is a good point... and bad. The DP continually loses health, forcing you to keep running and puzzle-solving and escaping deathtraps and killing baddies within a very tight time-frame. Waste a second and you'll have to reload. As he himself taunts the Prince, "Time is short. Time is fleeting."
Speaking of reloading, the game has a reloading mechanism that raises its dial to inhumanly difficult levels. Instead of the traditional save-anywhere system, the game lets you rewind time by a few seconds to undo that mis-timed jump off the wall, or that fall under a level biggie's sword. But when the enemy or the level kills you when you run out of sand... it's a long way from the previous autosave. The infutriating thing is, you can only stop playing at preassigned intervals, and many was the time I had to explain the game wouldn't let me stop and allow someone else to use the PC.
Sand got used up much more quickly than I thought. Sometimes the camera would turn 45 degrees, leaving me unsure which direction keys to press at a microsecond's notice. That said, our Prince is capable of both incredible agility and stupidity so sad it's laughable. And a few graphical bugs and illogical aspects (why can't the Prince slow his chariot-horses?) crept in, but they're insignificant dents in a grand and beautiful conclusion to the Sands of Time story.
Maybe I'm just a lousy platformer. The game's horribly time-consuming, but trust me, it's more absorbing than it's frustrating, more worth it than it's flawed. The voice acting and story are top-notch, and have to be seen, heard, experienced to be believed. It's well worth the trouble, and if you don't give up it will be a fun ride indeed. That the Bad Guys are defeated is all I can drop.

Get this game. I can't recommend it enough; just don't try to play too much in one sitting.

Final score: 8.4 (out of 10)