Warrior Within is not a perfect game. In many ways, it stands as a badly written testament to exactly what is wrong with video games: sexism, teenage hormones, amateurish writing, clumsy franchise handling. But it's entertaining. It's incredibly entertaining.

You get the impression that "The Sands of Time" was just a warm-up for the main event, a game that’s familiar at first but soon reveals a level of imagination beyond that of the original, and displays as little room for error as one of the Prince’s most daring acrobatic leaps. [Christmas 2004, p.100]

A consequence of this darker approach is that that game loses part of what made The Sands of Time unique. Instead of a charming and almost silly character like we saw previously, the Prince here is more one-dimensional.

While the game does address previous game issues and is a worthy successor to the previous title in its own way, it does make you wonder what the game could’ve been if it’d straddled the line between light and dark.

Bizarrely it’s not any aspect of the game that lets the experience down but that over style – we simply don’t like the mature nature of the game compared to the delights of its predecessor. The end result comes across as desperately trying to be edgy and blatantly falls short of the mark.

Too bad that all of the “enhancements” made to the prince's fascinating virtual world are actually liabilities. We are glad Ubisoft toyed with the bits that needed improvement, but we wonder why they “fixed” the things that were never broken.

The Prince's royale style-makers may have done their job, but the programmers needed to take another run at it. [March 2005, p.64]