Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
I think it’s almost cheeky of me to review this game. I haven’t played the original trilogy of games that some people seem to adore so much and I have a particular bias towards Ubisoft for filling my pants with the Anvil engine which gave us the Assassin’s Creed series. So I’m going to have to review this game on its own merit.
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands sees a Prince (unnamed, and if he is named I forgot) go to his brother’s kingdom which is under attack and then his brother unleashes a horrible curse upon his land which he must end. That’s it. There’s no other development really, there’s a lady who looks like Calypso from Shadowman who’s a Djinn and slowly gives you more powers (when she should really just give you ALL of them) , but apart from that the story is just a way of linking some platforming together.
Graphically, this game is actually rather pretty and although I try not to do the whole “graphics are nice” thing and these aren’t particularly stunning, it’s pretty enough.
Unfortunately, that will probably be the only wholly nice thing I’ll say about this game. Whilst the controls make sense and seem to work, the combat is functional but lacks style and flow and since a lot of the rooms require you to clear them of baddies before you move on it gets tiresome, boring and frustrating. The upgrade system though allows you to have full health from very early on in the game and means that the fights become even more of an annoyance as they present no real challenge. The boss fights are straight out of Batman: Arkham Asylum. IE: boring and unchallenging as they constitute the same dodge-attack-run away rota as Arkham.
Despite the lacklustre combat the platforming is some of the best I’ve seen in a good long while and the different elemental mechanics make for some challenging and interesting gameplay. However, each of these puzzles has a fixed camera and you have to do the correct thing to get the camera to change position, unfortunately what you have to get to is out of camera shot meaning that the beautifully crafted platforming is ruined by something which should be easy to get right by now. This became especially apparent during the FINAL chamber for me when I got stuck on the first puzzle due to me not being able to see how something worked, not any actual problems with the controls or my operation of them just a dodgy camera meaning I can’t see how to correct my mistakes. Sometimes the platforming would feel a little clunky and based on trial and error rather than any immediate skill or clever planning.
It’s said that the time reversal mechanic is what makes Prince of Persia so interesting and whilst it can deflate a tricky situation I found dying to be preferable because the game is so well checkpointed and the time reversal so limited. It got to the point for me where I was dying instead of using my time reversal because time reversal is so precious, which kind of defeats the object of the exercise.
Perhaps this is a stylistic point but despite the game being well checkpointed it lacks any definable chapters. This, for one, shows how shallow the story is in that the whole game is one chapter. It also has no manual save function meaning you have to complete the chamber you’re currently doing before you can safely turn your console off and these combining factors give them game a lack of any definition. Nothing definite happens, it’s all a minor variation on a theme. Your twatty brother becomes more of a twat. That’s about it and it sort of bugged me throughout the whole game how loose it feels.
I want to bring something up here, and it’s the traps. I appreciate how the circular saws moving around walls works, that’s fine. I like the moving pillars and spike traps and whizzy columns but the fucking swinging bars are a pain in the cunt. I took more damage from those fucking things than I ever did from combat and they just broke the flow of the game for me. In fact I found almost ALL the trap sections boring, especially when so much of the joy was to be found in the FLOWING platforming. Having to stop, walk around slowly and get unnecessarily worked up about a stupid feature is not a pelasant experience. I’m aware that this is something that was part of the original series or whatever but it’s just unnecessary and boring. It’s like chocobos in Final Fantasy games, unnecessary but there just because “it wouldn’t be a real part of the franchise if it wasn’t there”.
I was one of the very few people who enjoyed the 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia and even though the ending was fucking stupid and the smugness cranked right up, the platforming was superb and the advent of timed platforming was welcomed for the challenge. It lacked the traps and upgrade system which I see as unnecessary and even though the combat in that was stupid as fuck it was at least difficult in places and didn’t just feel like a grind.
I can recommend Prince of Persia: TFS, I suppose. I mean, I enjoyed the time I spent with the game but the combat was shoddy, the camera a real mess and the story’s development was so paper thin I almost shat out a kidney when something genuinely half-unexpected happened. In fact, looking back on it I would rather play the 2008 version again.