As the Prince, your job is to recapture the Sands of Time, which are mutating the people of your kingdom into bloodthirsty goons. Along the way, you’ll work on impressing the local princess and earn the right to be king of the kingdom. To do this, you’ll need to fend off sand-posessed opponents while slinking, stealthing, jumping and crawling your way through level after platforming level.

For such an early build of the game, the graphics are really impressive. The characters all move with a realistic smoothness, with little details such as the motion of their clothing giving the graphics that extra push. It’s evident Ubi took some cues from Splinter Cell when it came to fabrics and "soft" physics, as flags and curtains flow realistically when you brush against them or the wind blows through them. Texturing is evident everywhere, from the hieroglyphics on the walls to the little cracks in the brickwork. And the designers didn’t skimp on that texturing in any way, making sure to flesh out areas that most players might normally never notice. The only time the texturing stumbles is when you switch to first person view, then you’ll notice the detail going somewhat flat, but this is an early build after all, there’s plenty of time for touchup work before the holiday season release.

The Prince comes with a huge complement of cool moves, from his Matrix-styled slow-motion wall runs to the great cinematic switcheroos that happen whenever he jumps across a large gap. It’s pretty scary to think that Prince of Persia does "Matrix" far better than Atari’s Enter the Matrix did. In the first level alone, you’ll be forced to use everything from wall-scuttling moves, hanging hand-over-hand crawls and quick wall-bounces to clear areas. There’s a move for every occassion it seems, and you’ll need to use them all. A personal favorite is the "vault," which has you slowing time, then climbing up the front of your enemy to perform a flip over him. Upon landing, you deal two quick killing blows.

Combat is pretty simple hack-and-slash, yet it gets spiced up by the multi-target system. While attacking one target, you can point the analog stick in the direction of the next, and the Prince will deal a few blows, then jump, spin or flip towards the second target, deal out 40 whacks, then move on to your next victim. And you’ll need to use this feature, since the AI is not so kind as in other games, frequently ganging up to deal heaps of punishment upon the Prince’s head. There is one combat balance issue that needs to be worked out, and that’s caused by the aforementioned "vault" move. It’s far to easy to dispatch a room filled with baddies by simply positioning yourself for continual vault attacks. My record was five guys taken down in less than a minute thanks to the vault. This imbalance will definitely need worked out before the final game ships.

More surprising than the fact that the graphics are so polished for such an early build is the fact that the voice acting is shaping up to be top-notch. The dialogue is interesting, well-acted and actually helpful to propelling the story forward. Let’s also not forget the soundtrack, which we only got a taste of in the preview, but is impressive nonetheless. It’s a mix of techno, hard rock and arabian sounds that flow perfectly with the pace of the in-game action.

Even though it’s still early in the game’s development, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time looks to be shaping up as one of the platforming stars of the year. It’s a game that should be on every platformer fans holiday wish-list.