Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (2010)

So to begin, I played the PSP version of this game. There are five completely different games called Price of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (PSP, PS3/360/PC, DS, Wii and Mobile), and with the same box art. Outside of some loose theming common to the five games, these are all unique games with wildly different gameplay and stories.

So this game is... Rough. It should be good. It's a 2D platformer with some combat here and there. Thing is though... This game some janky, unfinished shit. Collision is inconsistent, and the "snap" platforming lifted from the Assassin's Creed games only works when it feels like it. Dodge rolling and countering are mapped to the same button, and if you are within range of an enemy, you will always counter when you want to dodge.

It looks nice enough for a PSP game, but the characters talk too damn much. Additionally, if you die on a boss or during a section of the game where someone talks, you will have to sit there and wait for the little cutscene to play. Every. Single. Time. And you cannot skip it.

Conceptually, I want to like this game. I think with some additional polish, this could have been a hidden gem for the PSP. But as it is.. Yeah, these sands are best forgotten.

It aged relatively well, the traversal and platforming is the highlight of the game, but I wish the difficult was higher, it only gets really interesting on the later levels.

They couldn't have made combat worst even if they tried, extremely boring and just smashing the attack button gets your through. The ability tree is underwhelming and not interesting at all. And the boss battles are terrible, they are just damage sponges with no teeth.

I also fell that the "rewind time" mechanic felt really out of place on the game, some of the other abilities kind of make it hard to rewind mid jump and retry, might as well redo the whole section. The game has enough checkpoints that it is probably just better to redo the whole section anyways. Also, the rewind ability doesn't seem t fill as often as i remember it did on the original game. Overall, i feel like this ability didn't fit.

It is a very forgettable experience and as much as I love the original experience, with so many other games out there, this is definitely one that can be skipped.

The traversal in this game is A+ for me. It feels so fluid, and the quick jump works so much better than previous games. I loved the simplified movement of 2008, but the addition of the new mechanics gives the more complicated platforming a really satisfying rhythmn here. Those new mechanics are mostly minor tweaks, but the core is classic SoT.

The combat is simple. Big groups of enemies that you hack away at. There are some special moves, but I only really used the Tornado one that knocks folks back. It is all very mindless and inoffensive. I missed the more developed combat system from WW or Two Thrones until I remembered that I didn't really like the combat in either of those games.

This game ends very abruptly and my brain erased the story as soon as the credits began to roll. It involved a brother and a Djinn... but it really doesn't matter. There was a pretty cool sandstorm. The animations are nice.

FS is weirdly devoid of any personality. The Prince is kind of just there, but isn't charming like SoT/2008 or annoyingly angsty like WW. It doesn't help that his character design looks like a generic placeholder that they forgot to replace.

There is also a lot of crank-based architecture if you enjoy "puzzles".

The bad guy is a big devil-looking beasty, so there's that.

Pure comfort food gaming.

I was surprised that this game had aged as well as it has; other than being (obviously) behind today's graphics, it was much more playable than I'd expected for its age. Which makes sense, as the Ubisoft team had 3 Prince of Persia games before this under their belt, that they'd have the mechanics pretty well-refined.

The platforming/acrobatics challenges are quite fun and well-designed, with a challenge curve that felt like it kept me on my toes without getting either boring/repetitive or overwhelming/frustrating. The combat was, as I've seen some other reviewers write, fairly 'meh' but there wasn't so much of it that it got super boring or repetitive; new enemy types would be introduced on the right curve to keep the combat at least slightly interesting.

The story/narrative wasn't super impactful - a pretty standard mysterious corrupting magic artifact with a Persian aesthetic story - but it was engaging and some of the dialogue, especially in the last quarter of the game, was pretty fun.

Definitely worth a playthrough.