The Prince of Persia series has been about for a while now. It has been reinvented time and time again and each reboot has added something to the franchise. The original 2D titles were fun, but their isometric viewpoint and insane difficulty put off players. Then, the series moved to 3D with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. This proved to be successful so Ubisoft released two sequels to this part of the series: Warrior Within and Two Thrones.
Following these, things went a little quiet with a few PSN, XBLA and PSP releases. Then, the series got another reboot in the form of the optimistically-titled “Prince of Persia”. The reboot was received well, thanks to a refined narrative and the inclusion of Elika, a witty NPC that follows the new re-designed, wisecracking prince about on his business. She was an intricately design central narrative point, being the answer to the game’s problems and saving the Prince from dodgy jumps.
We would love to say that Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands follows on with this good work from Ubisoft, but we regret to report it’s an updated version of the tried and tested Sands of Time formula. The Prince is now a lonely figure with poor voice acting, and an ugly redesign. His new look is bulkier and more Jake Gyllenhaal than Arabian Prince, probably to tie in to the new movie. Luckily, the game isn’t a movie tie-in.
The story basically revolves around the Prince stopping his brother ruling an undead army. It blossoms into a bizarre chase through an elaborately setup palace. Apparently it’s supposed to be set in-between The Sands of Time and Warrior Within, but the game never stops to tell the story so it’s hard for players to know this without checking up.
However, the gameplay is fundamentally good. Taken from a mix of all the 3D Prince of Persias so far, the controls and game experience are good, back to basics fun (think wall running, jumping, grabbing on to ledges). Disappointingly though, it does nothing to move the franchise forward, apart from elemental powers later on in the game such as turning water into ice. These crop up far too late to keep everything fresh, but do offer a subtle mix on the gameplay. Water streams become icy poles and waterfalls become parallel wall-jumping havens thanks to some intelligent environment manipulation. The fact of the matter is though; the elemental powers just manipulate the environment in a pre-determined manner.
Even time rewinding, a mainstay of the series, is a bit odd to control. It’s easy to get into an inescapable loop sometimes and with the elemental powers it becomes challenging to remember the tricky controls. It essentially becomes a game of twister in the end, as fingers and thumbs jump around the controller until the right combination is found or you screw up and die. Despite being unnecessarily tricky, it can be interesting to experiment with. If you die, you normally get put back right at the last auto-save point at the beginning of the section.
Talking about the levels, progression is dealt with in an Uncharted-like manner. Every area flows into the next without any loading, and most of the time without cutscenes. This is handled really well, with no slowdown at all. This should be the future of linear games, a rolling mission structure that follows a story in a flowing narrative. The only thing that brings the narrative down is the story and the cutscenes that drive them. The pacing in the game is handled well, with the puzzle sections making you stop and think for moment. In turn, this allows you to catch your breath and admire some of the more lavish scenery.
Unfortunately, the pacing doesn’t translate well to the combat. It’s been reduced to old-style hack and slash Prince with massive orgies of enemies running at the prince with weapons. Despite this, the combos are fairly basic so it’s accessible and fights don’t last for that long. Boss fights are delightfully toned down from the gargantuan beings cropping up in most games nowadays. They’re more manageable than before and surprisingly it doesn’t feel ridiculously easy, like it should to the casual observer or hardcore gamer.
The Forgotten Sands is not necessarily a bad game; it just doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen before. It’s disheartening given the style of the prior title in the series, with all of Ubisoft’s good work with reinventing the Prince being undone. The potential for this title was massive, but instead of getting a new Prince of Persia game we got Prince of Persia: Two Thrones 2.
Verdict: This game is the definition of a rental. It has some of the awesome gameplay you would expect from the series like wall running, clever jumps and such but can be highly repetitive thanks to some dull storytelling. It takes a while to get going but it’s a decent enough romp with some clever segments.
