PS2 owners may recognise that Revelations is essentially a port of the PS2's Prince of Persia: Warrior Within with some additional levels thrown in.

To help you, the Prince has a myriad of devastating combo attacks and visually stunning acrobatic moves. For instance, he can swing around a pole whilst kicking or swinging his sword to take down enemies in a 360 degree sweep, or he can flip on top of an enemy and grab and toss and slash him. The Prince can also wield a secondary weapon in his left hand, which he can throw or use for meelee attacks. To make combat even more interesting, the prince, through the passage of the game, will gain special time powers, allowing him to travel through, rewind or slow down time and perform powerful time attacks. These time powers require sand to work, which can be collected from various sources, such as dead enemies and breakable objects.

Combat isn't too difficult, with the exception of the bosses. In most cases enemies can be dealt with successfully with one proven combo or, to a lesser degree, random button mashing. The AI itself isn't that bad but it isn't anything to write home about either. For instance, grunts, when outnumbering you, don't seem to know how to flank you but bosses on the other hand can defend and parry your attacks.

Revelations isn't all about combat. Essentially, it is a 3D platform puzzle game, requiring you to nimbly negotiate the barriers/puzzles that block your progress physically and mentally. In fact, it becomes quite a common and necessary thing to have to stop and have a look around the environment, not to enjoy the visual spectacular but to figure out how to get from A to point B within the environment, which is usually large. Then, your dexterity is tested as you actually try to get your prince thither.

However, more frustrating is a culmination of the badly placed save/restart points and relatively slow load times. For instance, not ten minutes into the game, you face Shahdee, a boss. For those less experienced (even at normal difficulty), she'll make short work of you and you may end up having to repeat this up to ten times. This wouldn't be so frustrating if you didn't have to repeatedly wait about ten seconds for reloading, start half way between the beginning and Shahdee, repeat the slaughtering of a sizeable number of grunts and go through two 'micropauses' to load different environments. This does eventually become tolerable or even negligible when you start getting absorbed into the game.

The only truly unforgiveable part of Revelations is the audio. The background music and sound effects are good but marred by constantly cutting in and out. Speech, like the AI, isn't bad.

Control of the Prince, including camera angles and change of camera angle, is generally well done and smooth, but occassionally may feel a bit sluggish when frame rates drop due to too many moving objects. The frame rate drop isn't surprising considering that the animation, environments and characters (including lighting effects and textures) in Revelations are generally done very well, particularly animation for acrobatics.