In 2008 Ubisoft attempted to reboot the popular Prince of Persia franchise with the self-titled Prince of Persia using a whole new art style, combat system, and story-line. The results were somewhat polarizing. Many felt the game was too easy with it's impossible to die mechanic, while others bashed the combat mechanics. These things never bothered me much as I felt the franchise was beginning to get a little stale anyway, and I had an appreciation forwhat the developers were trying to accomplish. I particularly enjoyed how they gave it more of an open-world feel. Still, the original next generation Prince of Persia known as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time retains the crown as the pinnacle of the series, and after the criticism the last game received Ubisoft decided to take The Forgotten Sands back to the original story-line established in The Sands trilogy. The result is a game that recaptures the feel of The Sands of Time with some interesting new platforming and combat mechanics, but at the same time feels like a step back for the series.
STORY
The Forgotten Sands takes place in the seven year gap between The Sands of Time and Warrior Within, and sees the titular prince riding to meet his brother. Upon his arrival the prince finds his brother defending the kingdom in a losing battle. Seeing that the battle is not going his way, the brother decides to call upon an ancient power to come to his aid. This turns out to be a very bad idea as the release of this ancient magic in not interested in aiding anyone, but rather in gaining its' own power with the prince's brother as its' vessel. This is the set up, and pretty much as interesting as the story gets as the remainder of the game is just the prince trying to help/stop his brother and lock away this power forever. This left me somewhat disappointed as the story from Sands of Time was much more interesting, and had a very satisfying conclusion. Interesting enough in fact to spawn a movie adaption released earlier this summer.
PLATFORMING MADNESS
Anyone familiar with past Prince of Persia titles will feel instantly at home when jumping into The Forgotten Sands. This worried me at first since as I mentioned before the Prince of Persia series had begun to get a little stale, but Forgotten Sands gradually ramps up the platforming difficulty by introducing new mechanics, chief among these being through the prince's ability to stop time which affects running water opening up new platforming possibilities. I'll give an example: The player will be presented with a solid wall directly across from a running water fall with another solid wall on the other side of the waterfall with the objective being to reach the ledge at the top of the wall. The player must wall run up wall 1, wall jump through the waterfall to the other solid wall, wall jump again, freeze time in mid-air turning the waterfall into a now solid wall, and then wall jump again off of the waterfall to reach the ledge at the top of solid wall 2. This is just a simple example of this new gameplay mechanic. As the game progresses, these types of platforming puzzles get more and more complex and require a great amount of well-timed button presses. The prince gains two additional abilities throughout the game that adds to the platforming dynamic; one which allows him to perform a speed dash/warp in mid-air to a nearby target, and another that allows pieces of building eroded by time to reappear. These abilities make for some great platforming that feel right at home in Prince of Persia. Most important to the platforming, however, is the very welcome return of the ability to rewind time. This remains one of the best gamplay mechanics ever placed in a video game due to its' perfect balance of taking out the element of constantly dying resulting in seeing a game over screen while still rewarding the player with a since of accomplishment by putting a limit to the amount of times this mechanic can be used.
COMBAT
With platforming being the star of the show Prince of Persia's combat, while not terrible, has never been its' greatest strength. Unfortunately, it hasn't been much improved here, but the prince is given new combat abilities such as fire, ice, and ground-pounding throughout the game which adds a lot more interest to the combat gameplay. The main problem is the flow of combat still lacks a little fluidity, and the enemy types don't really change much throughout the course of the game, rather only the number of enemies you fight at one time. This often results in a lot of random button-mashing, so the new abilities add a bit of freshness to the mix.
PRESTATION/GRAPHICS
2008's Prince of Persia went with a whole new cell-shaded art style,which in my opinion looked rather beautiful, but with Forgotten Sands the developers decided to go back with the more realistic look that was used in Sands of Time, however the colors and graphics come across a little muddy and somewhat ugly compared to other games in this genre. This is somewhat disappointing seeing as how Ubisoft's other franchise, Assassin's Creed, looks so fantastic.
OVERALL
Fans of the Prince of Persia series and those turned off by the 2008 version will find a fun and enjoyable experience to be had with The Forgotten Sands that brings Prince back to its' roots. My wish for the future of this series is that they take the elements that made the original series so great while marrying those elements with the things that worked with the 2008 version, namely the open-world feel. I had a good time playing this game, but with the campaign only taking 8-10 hours, no multi-player element, and low replay value I would probably recommend this only as a very good rental
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