I originally played the demo on Android for some unknown reason and enjoyed the fluid movement and combat enough to give the full game a go. After getting fed up with the Ubisoft launcher I had to emulate the Switch version and so the first half of the game was me struggling with the location of the A and B buttons. The fact that I ended on a positive note after all that bullshit is the most glowing recommendation I can give.

As the demo showed, movement and combat is fluid and satisfying. A good combination of complex platforming, combos, parries and DMC-style enemy air-juggling that really never got old even in the late game. Exploration is also very satisfying thanks to the screenshot mechanic and the "guided mode". I never not knew where I could go to find something new.

The signposting of the location of the next critical areas was also very useful to know where NOT to go before exploring all that I wanted to explore. I found that that worked really well with my expectations. Since I always had a rough idea of where was forward progression and where was just pissing about with platforming challenges, I was able to pace them out. Tired of roaming about? Then just go do some progression.

Platforming challenges were a particular standout. The difficulty ramps up along with the new abilities in very satisfying ways. Some of the harder areas feel like boss fights by their own right and have the same arc. You walk into the level and get slapped with a seemingly-impassable wall of spikes and buzzsaws, and by the end you glide though the gaps like a fish in water.

The boss fights, on the other hand, are kind of annoying. The whole combat system is about combos and juggling enemies, and parrying their attacks and how they even respond to your movements. And that all goes out the window in boss fights. Bosses just do their attacks for you to avoid and then sneak one of two hits in between. They will start a big-ass attack in the middle of your combo so you can see yourself frozen mid-slash during their overlong cinematics. In a game with this fluid of a combat system, repeatingly taking control from the player so the boss can do it's little dong and dance routine before (and during) an attack is a crime.

But setting bossfights aside, the whole game was just fun and enjoyable.

I didn't wind up finishing this one. I really wanted to, but there's such a severe late-game difficulty spike that no tinkering of the (otherwise excellent) accessibility settings could overcome.

So let's start with that ONE negative... The lengthy parkour-platforming segments where you have to string together dozens of inputs with no break and no checkpoints are excessive. One thing I really, really struggle with in games, perhaps owing to my ADHD, is when games give you way too many inputs and not enough time to process which button does which thing. This was a major problem with Metroid Dread for me, as well - just too many things on the controller. When these platforming segments are really popping off, the game expects you to memorize 60+ seconds of inputs strung together, and I simply can't do it. I can't remember them, and I can't react in time without flubbing an input trying to recall if I need to tap the right stick, press B, or hit the right trigger. These segments desperately need better check pointing, or at very least the option to have it (save states?).

So let's move on to the (many) positives.

As I mentioned, the accessibility features in this game are incredible. It won the Game Award for accessibility, and it honestly deserved it. You can adjust many of the difficulty sliders at will, at any time - want the enemies to have 0.4× health and do 1.3× damage? You can, and there's no penalty for doing so. That's in addition to that, there's a super comprehensive suite of visual and audio accessibility features, including one for vision-limited players that makes a stark differentiation between the player, danger objects and interactable objects. So perhaps you can see why the platforming sections mentioned above are so disappointing to me.

I also love, love, LOVE the commitment to Persia, not just using the setting as a loose framework to be vaguely Arabic, but diving deep into Persian mythology and imagery in a truly inspired way, even going so far as to have Cuneiform text feature prominently. The inclusion of a Persian (Farsi) audio track here is incredible as well, and really helps sell the authenticity of the setting. While I can't understand the language, the performances really stand out to me as being both remarkably well-delivered and distinctly Persian, and seeing how different cultures interpret the performance for different character tropes was really, really cool. The art style is excellent as well, using plenty of panache to really give it some flare.

Up until the difficulty spike, I found the actual gameplay to be... Excellent. You have a wide arsenal of tools to enhance your movement tech, and the individual rooms all feel very well-designed and intentional. The map is massive, but each region of the map feels unique and tends to use certain gameplay mechanics as signature to each. But I do think this contributes to the game feelings maybe longer than it should be - gating key movement tech like double-jumps to the back half of the game really slows down navigation.

The other issue I have really just comes down to the finicky nature of 2.5D graphics. Because platforms rotate slightly with the camera, it can be hard to judge jumps sometimes, especially when quick reaction is required. Additionally, I did occasionally find myself falling through platforms or dashing through vertical boards. Hit detection seems to be a little inconsistent overall, with insta-death objects like spikes (and especially the red crystals in the Sand Pit area) having unclear or inconsistent death zones. It wasn't really a problem for the most part, but combined, it becomes incredibly frustrating in the late game when your perfect string of inputs is ruined by a gap between spikes ejecting you like it's got a bouncer and you're not welcome in the Progress Night Club.

Overall, I think there's something really special in here, and it's unfortunately ruined by a desire to be "hard for the sake of hard" instead of making the game accessible, which is bizarrely antithetical to the myriad accessibility settings included here. If those parkour segments were just giving some kind of checkpointing, this would easily be a 4+ star title. But as it stands, this one's only for players that demand a stark challenge.

I recently finished playing through Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and I had a really fun time doing so. It's a really fun Metroidvania with lots of charm and personality, and while I don't think it's the best game there is, Ubisoft truly knocked it out of the park with this release. Prince of Persia is back, baby!

In The Lost Crown, you play as Sargon, a young warrior from an elite group of soldiers called The Immortals. After successfully defending the empire from a Kushan invasion, everyone in the palace starts celebrating. And while everyone is distracted by the party, Ghassan, the Prince of Persia™ gets kidnapped by one of the generals and taken to an ancient city in Mount Qaf. It's now your task, along with the rest of the Immortals, to go to there and rescue the Prince of Persia™ before it's too late.

The story gets a lot more convoluted as you continue playing since, just like in any Prince of Persia game from this century, there's some time-related shenanigans going on. I think the writers did a fantastic job with Lost Crown, as even with all the weird stuff happening in it, the story never feels hard to follow. Yes, there's a lot time travel, time loops, and time lines, but they're slowly fed to the player throughout the entire game, making the overall entire story easy to piece together.

I think the part I love the most about this game's writing is that a lot of it is stupid, or doesn't really make sense, yet the writers still added it because it's fun. It's all so exaggerated and exciting in a way that I can only describe as shonen-like, the rule of cool is in full effect, and the writers know it. Because sure, it shouldn't be possible for a regular human to beat a guy who can rewind time with zero restrictions or repercussions. But wouldn't it be fun if you could?

The gameplay in Lost Crown is really fun as well! It's a Metroidvania with a very heavy emphasis on smooth movement and combos, and while at first it may seem like it's just your average action Metroidvania, the developers made sure to add a lot of variety to your moveset, and a lot of ways for your moves to interact between them. The more you play, the better you get at it, and by the end of the game your attacks will flow perfectly from one to the next, making for one of the most satisfying movement systems I've seen, both in and out of combat.

I especially like the puzzles in the game and the boss fights, as they're all pretty challenging and fully utilize all of the player's abilities in clever ways. It never feels like any of the abilities you get are wasted or useless, you're always wondering what your new abilities can be used for every time you get them. You can also access a few optional challenges in the hub if you want to test your skills, in both platforming and combat. These are fine, although some of them are a bit overtuned.

But sadly, no matter how many mechanics they add on top, there are many times when the game still feels like it's a Hollow Knight clone. The developers clearly lifted a lot of the mechanics from it, and then tried to edit them into something different halfway through. This is not to say that Lost Crown is a bad game, quite the contrary, but even when the final product is different to its inspiration, it never truly feels unique or original.

While I may not be the biggest Metroidvania fan there is, I can still appreciate a well crafted map. And the one in Lost Crown? Well... I'm conflicted about it.

The map is functional, yes, however it feels way too big for the stuff that's in it. There are lots of optional paths connecting all of the areas, and not enough rewards given for exploring them. Sure, you can find collectibles and treasure along the way, but most of them only serve to deepen the lore of this world, with basically all of your upgrades coming from the store, so finding these items is never truly rewarding. There were times where I spent a full day exclusively going through unexplored areas of the map, but never advanced the story or earned any new items.

What's worse is that, at certain points of the story, you'll end up coming to a dead end, and the game will just say "Go look for more stuff to do and then come back!", which can lead to literal hours of aimlessly wandering around the map looking for the next trigger in the story if you don't want to rely on the hint system. The only saving grace for this is that movement are combat in this game are fun by themselves, making exploration just a little tad less annoying.

Finally, let's talk about the presentation: OH MY GOD This game is beautiful??? It has this over-the-top style full of personality shown throughout the entire game that looks simply amazing, even when playing on inferior hardware like the switch. While some of the animations have a bit of that signature Ubisoft jank, overall, the entire game is beautifully made by developers that clearly cared a lot about this product. I love it.

In conclusion: This is an amazing game. Ubisoft did an incredible job making The Lost Crown, and I don't think there's a single part of this game that's bad. The gameplay's fun and responsive, the visuals are fantastic, and the story is just a lot of fun to go through. Sure, some of the challenges the game throws at you can be annoying at times, but I don't think they detract from the overall experience.

However, I still wish there was a little more to this game. Because yes, the game is amazing in every aspect, but there really isn't anything that sets it apart from the rest. I really wish the game had some sort of gimmick, or X factor that truly made the game unique, but aside from the fluid movement, there isn't much. Still, as it is, it's a very damn good Hollow Knight clone. 9/10

What works

• This is a super competent Metroidvania with a skill and map progression that keeps going late into the game
• Visual and level design is incredibly cool with some of my favourite environments in any game I’ve played for a while
• Challenging but fair and most importantly fun combat and movement mechanics

What doesn’t

• Chugs a bit on Switch and doesn’t scale nicely to the TV in terms of fidelity. Looks great handheld though
• I don’t really rate the music, the only time I noticed it was when it was grating
• Some enemies are just irritating regardless of how levelled up you are (e.g. giant eagles)

Verdict

I love a good Metroidvania and this didn’t disappoint. I had terrific fun from start to finish with little exception or even real substantive criticism to give. I was shocked by the scale of the worlds offered even before I’d filled out the map, and there are some real highlights in creativity for level and visual design.

It’s longer than I expected—with a fair bit of exploring I clocked in at just under 22.5 hours—and while the plot seemed fairly standard-fare in the first half of the game, there were enough twists and turns in the back half to keep things interesting. I haven’t gone back to clean up the side quests and find hidden treasure, and to be honest I probably won’t. I settled on a selection of amulets I was happy with fairly early on, and so I had long since maxed out everything I was using even without the additional rewards from side quests.

Excellent game, highly recommended.

A good metroidvania is the key to my gaming soul, and this is indeed a solid entry to the sub-genre's pantheon. Having just 100%-ed it, clocking around 47 hours (some of that left idling on the pause menu), it's definitely among the upper tier of such games, but it does have its issues. Of them, the ones that stood out most to me were the sometimes rather large distances between fast travel points, the finicky and sometimes loose controls, and, frankly, the speed at which the boss encounters move and the hard spike in difficulty that latter ones present, beginning with the forest witch. I found that while the platforming difficulty ramped up beautifully, the combat spikes were at times enough to make me want to walk away. And I'm not too proud to admit that I did drop the difficulty after a point, in part because, to be totally transparent, at 42 my eyes could not keep up with some of the movements. This was mostly an issue with the aforementioned forest witch, the fight with Mel... whatever his name is—bow and arrow dude, and with the Sargon clone fights. I genuinely struggled in all cases to follow what was happening (and in the case of the latter, to differentiate between the characters—it was a struggle to follow my Sargon). I'm not sure if it's an age thing or an on-screen chaos thing, as I certainly did not have this trouble with Hollow Knight (which I would say was close to this level of speed with respect to attacks and the like).

In the end, these issues don't detract too much from the overall experience, and I remained hooked through to the end (even if those final few percentage points were tediously acquired by upgrading). Art style was gorgeous if difficult to follow at times, music was... there. But the platforming is where this game shines brightest.

An excellent metroidvania, but not quite a great one.

this is why I'm not allowed to play metroidvaniae. this game kept me up past 2am four days in a row, made me forget lunch, made me late to appointments. I took the middle chunk of today to finish it off in part just to be free of it. it is very good in a deeply unhealthy way.

not to stray from the point too hard but grouvee's lack of half-stars is really ruining me, because there is a significant range of quality between this, lacuna, and herald of havoc, but I've given them all the same rating because 5/5 is "as high as it gets" and 3/5 is "perfectly fine," and that's just not enough to work with. (could fill an afternoon rambling about how 2/5 has to cover the entire spectrum of dislike short of "the worst.") lost crown is a very, very good game that I probably liked a bit less than herald of havoc even as I recognize it is both more impressive and more substantive, and is a much better game than lacuna though somewhat less interesting. c'est la vie boheme.

things I loved: combat and movement controls are delectable. main character sargon is an absolute dish. voice acting across the board is phenomenal. there are some structural issues with the writing but the dialogue itself if really elegant, striking a fabulist tone that fits with the mythological setting. the deep love of middle eastern mythology is infectious. art style and animation is top notch, most especially in the gleefully shonen cutscenes and boss fights. each ability unlocked is fun and fascinating, useful in both platforming and combat, and (most) secret-hunting is fun for its own sake.

things I did not so much love: I don't know what to do with all this fucking money. there are three kinds of currency and far too little to spend it on. the hardest platforming challenges are for this specialty coin that operates like the strawberries in celeste (i.e. you have to grab it and get to safe ground before it's collected), but there are only two places to spend the coins, I cleaned one out completely and I guess I could've spent it in the other, upgrading all the amulets I didn't even use, but that seems like a waste. another of the hardest platforming challenges netted me a new skin for the player character, and not even one that changes the model, just a (frankly kinda ugly) palette swap. I mean, I did the challenges cuz they were fun, so the reward itself isn't that important, but I'd rather get no reward than a crappy one.

and there are parts of the plot missing. I wouldn't call them holes per se - with the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey going on, I can kinda justify most things that cocked my eyebrow - but some developments are so truncated (especially near the climax) that it felt almost like a scene had been skipped. but, no, I think some scenes just aren't there, or scenes that should carry a lot of weight are just a couple lines and a few animations. earlier developments play out like high-ass melodrama, so it's very weird when major twists are tossed off. there is some other stuff I'll spoiler tag below.

overall, it's the good kind of derivative. most of its structure is borrowed from somewhere else - you can see the debt to celeste, hollow knight, blasphemous, metroid dread - but it is all blended so fluidly that it's hard to complain. it just can't really rock my world the way any of those did. the setting is fascinating but it isn't explored with the depth and worldbuilding of something like hollow knight, doesn't delve into its persian mythology the way blasphemous does spanish catholicism. so in the end it's a great and addictive time but nothing's gonna stick to my ribs. its pleasures are temporal, lasting only as long as the game does (which, fair enough, is a damn long time), and now I move on.

ok spoilers: I guess I still don't know why the inciting incident even happened. like, why did thomyris stage the kidnapping of her own son? I assumed it was to protect him from varhram, but this is never confirmed. also radjen just goes awol after a while, never seen or mentioned again, that does not seem intentional. but the big thing is how obvious they make it that sargon is secretly a prince himself, but they do absolutely nothing with this fact. like I thought I must've failed some side quest that unlocks a true ending, but no. I didn't do the "collect three bells" challenge because it was annoying and the rewards were crap, but apparently that spells it out explicitly, not that I hadn't figured it out from the giant snake and the sand prophecy and the title of the game. but apparently nothing comes of it even then! what the heck?!