Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands

The last couple Prince of Persia games had left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, I had finished 3, and abandoned the “artsy” reboot that came out last year near the end. The media was saying all the right things about this game to me, not the least being that it had returned to the formula that made 1 and 2 so good. If this turns out to be true then I think I’m going to love this game.

The story here isn’t a big departure from the rest of the series, I don’t want to say it’s serviceable because I don’t think that is doing it enough justice but it’s not outstanding thats for sure. It suits the game very well I found and does give you enough motivation to keep going. The prince himself is his usual “witty” or rather sarcastic self… I said to myself more than a couple times, “this guy is an idiot” but if you can comes to terms with that early enough you can get a chuckle out of a few of his one-liners.

“Prince of Parkour” is at the most basic of levels a platform puzzle game, yhe platforming is 3 fold; you will often walk into a big room where you will get a pan of the pathway to get to door usually several floors up. There isn’t much thinking about where to go in these rooms. It usually means finding the pillar or platform you can reach, and move the only way you can from there, rinse and repeat. The challenge here comes from your abilities coming into play. For example, you’ve probably seen the water freezing stuff from the promos or videos elsewhere, it comes down to timing, sometimes the next spout isn’t on when you froze the first one, so as you jump for spout 1, you need to release the freeze button wait for the next spout to start pumping and freeze it again before you get there. This all happens in a fraction of a second. There are several ways that they use the water to get in the way.

how to swing on water...

The second way they use platforming is through narrow trap laden corridors that depend purely on timing, you run, jump, and climb your way around saw blades, swinging axes, spikes on the floor, swinging spiked beams. and spinning rotating poles with blades on them… none of this is new to the franchise but they do throw some tricky ones at you, and if you don’t have rewinds available you may actually die here… luckily you’re never really far from a check point.

The final is by way of switch and lever puzzles to open doors. Luckily they are few and far between, I think there was maybe 5 or 6 of them through the entire course of the game, none overly challenging, and I think I only found one or two of them to be tedious.

Between platforming you spend your time in “Prince of Pottery-rage” busting any (what may be priceless) vase you cross trying collect red and blue floaty orbs, to refill your health and ability meters, if the orbs float and go right towards you anyway… whats the point of destroying the priceless artifact?.. no manners thats why… the prince is just another “entitled” rich kid I guess…

Fully leveled whirlwind ability... potent

There is also some combat in “Prince of Push-Square”, it’s not a fantastic fighting system, you get a sword and a kick button, and there is some variety in the baddies that change how you should fight them. To help you can learn abilities when you collect enough yellow orbs to level up… to be honest I only ever used the whirlwind, once that was maxed out it was pretty effective at controlling the room. It’s like a built in Dynasty Warriors mini-game that you used to replenish your health and abilities meters and give you some sense of character progression. It was definitely fun in the small doses it’s given to you in. I even enjoyed the challenge mini-games that unlock when you complete the game. I think it can get by with this minimal combat system because it’s not the whole game, it doesn’t need a stellar combat system like say, Arkham Asylum did.

When it’s all said and done, I had a GREAT time with this game, it’s so rare that I can say a game delivered exactly what I wanted it too, especially since it was so far removed from the last version of the game that used that formula. I’ve got to say, if you played the original Prince of Persia on the last gen consoles and enjoyed it, you are going to love this game. Conversely, if you didn’t like the early PoPs, this probably isn’t for you. If you missed those games, and only played the last couple, I think this is a great one to get on board with. There really aren’t any other games that quite compare to PoP, and I think you’d be doing yourself a disservice for passing on it.