Hi all, I bought all of the PoP games during the latest summer sale after eyeing them up for a few years and finally deciding to take the plunge. I decided to play them in release-order as that's how I roll generally, so I am starting out with Sands of Time at the moment. I have completed the first two checkpoints in the game so far and here are some of my thoughts and observations.

I'm finding the prince's movement controls to be a bit awkward, as well as the camera. It might just be that it uses mechanics I'm not used to. I'm rather fond of Tomb Raider style movement/camera controls and finding the Sands of Time's controls to be a bit awkward but I'm sure I'll get used to it after I play it longer.

The bigger issue though is that I seem to completely suck at combat. I made it through to where I am now without too much fanfare, but when battles start there are usually 4 enemies which respawn almost as fast as I can kill them. I find that I'm unable to use the dagger to extract their sand souls or whatever without another enemy hitting me for significant damage, so I end up running around attacking them and taking them down, then defending myself against another attacker and another and another, and then the one I first knocked down is back up again all while I take the odd hit here and there and my health deteriorates. Obviously this is purely due to lack of skill with the game and that will come with time, but I am starting to dread the fights as I am finding them notoriously difficult. In contrast, I'm finding the parkour puzzle aspects of the game to be rather fun.

While in battle I notice various tutorial text pop up on the screen, but if I avert my eyes from the battle long enough to read it, it either disappears or I am seriously injured or killed so I rarely know what it says or have time to mentally process the keystroke it is suggesting to me in order to potentially use it, or I do use it and have no idea what to do next as it often seems like either nothing happens, or something does happen and I just don't know what to do next.

So I end up more or less playing it like Mortal Kombat, where you just randomly mash buttons as fast as possible and hope for the best, with the odd amazing "holy shit, I can't believe I just did THAT LOL" moment popping up every now and then. :)

After a few attempts to battle a group of enemies that results in fail, if my frustration goes up I need to take a break so I exit the game but it seems it is solely checkpointed and when reloading you lose all progress since the last checkpoint and have to do it all over again. Also frustrating.

But... the game is still pretty fun. :) So, I fired open the manual and read the whole thing and learned of various special moves etc. but haven't yet gotten a chance to try them, that'll be for my next continuation.

I'm wondering if anyone who rocks their socks with this game might be able to offer some game play tips that might drag me out of suckville. ;oP

I loved this game the first time I played it! But when I played it again years later I found myself incredibly annoyed with the combat. It felt like the enemies were too tough to take down, or rather it took too long to take them down, which made a lot of fights quickly feel like an overly long affair.

Luckily this was fixed in the excellent sequel Warrior Within. There you have a massively expanded set of fighting moves that allows you to increase your skill level to a point where you can deal with most enemies or groups of enemies in a swift, deadly and spectacular fashion.

That's NOT how you should play Mortal Kombat ;-P.

But on topic. The only difficulty in combat is keeping Farah alive. Other than that there is little challenge. Every enemy type has a move that they will never block, you will quickly learn which moves work.
So use a pattern: jump over + single slash, retrieve while still in air.
If that doesn't work - jump over + double slash, retrieve when they are on the ground.
If that doesn't work - rebound from wall - retrieve when they are on the ground.

Countering has a really tricky timing (unlike in WW) so I don't recommend that.

Use freeze on enemies you have hard time with and mega-freeze whenever you have a chance (that needs complete power tanks though, so there aren't that many places where you can use it).