Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands

I've been a fan of the Prince of Persia franchise ever since 2003's The Sands of Time. The combination of acrobatics and combat-- along with the sweeping environments -- made the Prince of Persia franchise one of my favorites from the last generation. And despite Ubisoft beating the franchise into the ground by releasing sequel after sequel each year, I still bought and played them all -- though I recognized that the Prince was starting to feel more than a little tired.

But the 2008 Prince of Persia -- a reimagining of the franchise that took away almost all the player's ability to fail -- showed that the Prince needed more than just a few tweaks and a short break to be exciting all over again. While some people enjoyed the ultra-forgiving, you-can't-lose aspect of the 2008 PoP, I felt like the game had brought this aspect in at the expense of the sense of accomplishment the previous games evoked. The Prince's adventures need to be beatable, sure, but player's don't need to have their hand held all the way.
Which is why I think I enjoyed the latest game, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, as much as I did. While much more than a simple rehash of previous PoP mechanics, Forgotten Sands manages to find a fine balance between reward and punishment. Combine this with some awesome new mechanics and a combat system that really comes into its own by the end of the game, and it's easy to recommend despite the boring story and rather unpolished feel of the game's visuals.

In The Forgotten Sands you play as the titular Prince of Persia, a handsome, acrobatic warrior with a penchant for climbing just about anything and destroying anyone who he comes to blows with. The Prince goes to visit his brother and in typical videogame fashion things go awry, magical enemies appear, and he's quickly dragged into an epic quest that will take him through the ruins of a kingdom in an effort to save the world. It's the sort of stuff that previous PoP games were all about, but I have to say that this storyline pales in comparison to The Sands of Time (the PoP game that all are measured against in my mind), and never managed to pull me in to the narrative. However, while the story failed to catch my attention, the acrobatic platforming the franchise is known for managed to get me hooked all over again. The Prince has the uncanny ability to run up walls and be an all-around monkey when it comes to climbing, and the game gives you plenty of environments to ninja about in. Each area the Prince enters is essentially a level, and it's up to you to figure out what moves you need to pull out in order to make it through.

The first couple of hours of platforming would have you thinking it's a relatively easy game, but it gets more difficult as the Prince unlocks new powers. During the quest the Prince will eventually gain the ability be to temporarily freeze water into climbable objects and make certain portions of ruins appear as they were before they were destroyed. The game gradually ramps up the difficulty, forcing the player to combine these powers until eventually they're encountering rooms where all of them are used in epic sequences that make the game feel like a mix of platformer and rhythm action