Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands Impressions

I was waiting to get my hands on Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands since its announcement back in May 2009. I immensely enjoyed Prince of Persia [2008], with its cel-shaded graphics and open-ended gameplay. The new PoP was advertised to take the series ‘back to its roots’. I was further intrigued, having never played the original PoP: Sands of time.

The game finally got released for Windows platform in June 2010, complete with the dreaded requirement of ‘always-ON’ internet connection. I ‘acquired’ it and played. Total play-time is about 8~10 hrs.  Here are my impressions:

1. The prince looks like an ass. He is supposed to be a 'Prince', right? He looks more like a commoner with zero facial features and a voice that doesn't go well with his more-plump-than-athletic physique. Perhaps it’s nitpicking to comment on main characters’ looks in a platformer game, but common, you play as the Price and there are certain obvious expectations associated with characters of his status. The game’s Prince is as anti-prince as you can get, look wise

2. Nothing kills the immersion like stuttery and jerky frame rate in a platformer. Fortunately, the graphics are nice and the game runs smoothly. Of late, most of the Ubisoft games seem to be better optimized for the PC, which is certainly a good thing.

3. Controls: The controls are somewhat clunky to use. Basic actions like jumping, running and scaling the walls can be executed easily. However, once the Prince starts gaining new powers, the number of keys for executing extra moves keep on adding. By the end of the game, it’s as much a challenge to traverse the game environment as it is to press the right combination of keys. The difficulty then isn't so much about managing jump timings right as it is about pressing the awkwardly placed keys in rapid succession. Sure, you can bind them to your heart's liking, but still, it never seems as smooth as say, Assassin's Creed games (another Ubisoft platformer).  This iteration of PoP is clearly better played with a gamepad.

4. Camera: Restricted camera is another fun killer on a number of occasions. The sense of direction is often lost when the camera pans the view midway of the jump. So when you are pressing the forward key, due to sudden camera angel shift, now its the 'right' key that you need to press for moving forward. In other platformer games, it didn’t seem this abrupt. Moreover, due to game’s tendency of locking the camera on ‘bosses’, its frustrating to move towards, say, health jars when you are running low on health in the middle of the battle. Sometimes, the camera is placed such that it’s not clear where you have to go next. I understand the need of hand-holding players by locking the camera perspective, but that mechanic should not compromise the playability.

5. Combat is mostly filler with lame enemies and lamer booses! And there are only 3-4 versions of these sand zombies, including bosses, so it gets real boring real fast. Oft advertised ‘crowd control’ feature turns out to be mere gimmick which I doubt anyone even uses. 

6. Bugs: This is the first Ubisoft game in which I encountered weird bugs, glitches and gameplay exploits. Since there are no manual save slots (why?), sometimes a door will remain closed on load with no ways of reaching its triggering mechanism. The only option is, *gasp*, to restart the game from the beginning!

7. I understand that you are playing as Prince traversing a castle filled with deadly traps...but there are only so many times I want to see the same spiked log hanging mid-air. Admittedly, it has an obvious advantage that, once you know how to dodge the spiked monstrosity, it’s simply a matter of pressing the jump button at the right time, and then you use that throughout the game. Some trap variations would have been welcome…   

8. The actual platforming bits are nice though. The difficulty rises gradually and after completing some long platforming sections (jump, scale, freeze water, scale, freeze, hang, jump, unfreeze, freeze, hang and then jump!) it really feels rewarding. Plus, it looks awesome in action.

9. Soundtrack is bland and recycles continuously. Characters are forgettable and there is a black female Djinn! Ugh. I guess, it has become mandatory for western game developers to project themselves as ‘non-racist’ by purposefully making some characters black…anyways.

In the end, I will recommend this game to anyone looking for a decently challenging platformer, but then the better alternative is Assassin’s Creed series.  For all the Prince of Persia fans, this should be a no-brainer choice.