After a considerable hiatus, Ubisoft has made a bold return to the Prince of Persia series with Prince of Persia The Lost Crown. Fans eagerly anticipated this release, hoping it would capture the essence of the beloved franchise. As the game finally graces the gaming landscape, the question remains: Does it successfully strike the right chords and bring joy to the hearts of fans? Discovering if it lives up to expectations is an exciting journey that awaits both long-time enthusiasts and newcomers alike.
Time is not a river flowing surely in one direction. For Sargon, one of the fabled elite Persian warriors known as the Immortals, this is a lesson he is going to learn all too well. The past, the future, the present, they’re all flowing together, colliding into one in the massive and mysterious Citadel known as Mount Qaf. And it’s here that the Immortals have to go to save a kidnapped prince of Persia.
It’s been far too many years without a Prince of Persia game and while we’re still been treated to radio silence on the eagerly anticipated Sands of Time remake, Ubisoft has chosen to break their long-standing tradition of massive 3D open-world games in favour of a return to 2D gaming in all it’s wonderful glory with the Metroidvania inspired Prince of Persia The Lost Crown.
While this is a return to Prince of Persia’s roots from a 2D point of view, it’s another reinvention of the series since its jump to 3D with Sands of Time. Yes, the magnificent visuals are fully 3D with polygon characters and world design, but it’s a complete 2D Metroidvania at heart that takes its inspirations both from the humongous Metroidvania genre and the Prince of Persia games that have come before.
What you can expect here is a massive world of interconnected biomes, some of which you can only reach once unlocking new abilities, serious platforming challenges and some stunning and tough combat and bosses. There are plenty of hidden secrets to find, treasures to unlock and lore to uncover. Mount Qaf is rife with secrets that are only open to those willing to put in the effort to find them and the lore adds some much-needed context to what happened here. The bosses you fight and the enemies you encounter, most of their tragic backstories are contained within.
Getting to the secrets is where Prince of Persia The Lost Crown presents its most complex platforming challenges. From giant swinging axes to spiked walls and rolling blades of pillars, Prince of Persia The Lost Crown throws some magnificent platforming sequences and puzzles at you. The best of which recalled moments both from Sands of Time and the underloved Forgotten Sands.
Of course, it wouldn’t mean anything if you didn’t have the tools to navigate them and the developers have given you plenty to play with, the bulk of which work as well in combat as they do in environment navigation. Air dashes, wall jumps and back flips bring the environment and Sargon to life impeccably with a swiftness and fluidity of animation.
Moving through the environment is an absolute joy and you’re never more than a minute or more away from another ledge to climb or wall to parkour to the top off. This way the constant movement keeps you completely engaged even when you’re backtracking to find those secrets or open up new areas.
And you will be going back and forth quite a bit as new abilities become available to you. One of my pet peeves in Metroidvanias is the usual inability to mark off points on your map as interesting or locked for now. Some Metroidvanias let you drop pins in, but I’ve always wanted to be able to drop a pin and manually label it so that I would know exactly what’s needed there.
Ubisoft have gone one better by letting you take a snapshot of the environment and automatically pinning it to the map where you are. It’s a brilliantly simple addition that should become a norm as it completely does away with the ambiguity of a waypoint or pin by letting you know, visually, what you need to go back for.
Combat is just as much a part of your journey as platforming so it’s a complete joy to say that the combat system is excellent and just as well animated and fluid as Sargon’s other moves. Sargon has quite the toolset available to him, from charged attacks to combos to air juggles. There’s a series of challenges you can
take on that will teach you the basics of combat and the game’s default combos and juggles but with such a fluid system, it’s easy to chain your own moves together and create your own combos. Prince of Persia The Lost Crown’s combat system ends up feeling more akin to Devil May Cry’s hack-and-slash madness than anything else. It makes combat completely enthralling and a sight to behold as it’s flashy, brutal and incredibly fast.
As with most games recently, parrying is a huge part of Prince of Persia The Lost Crown’s combat system. While there are the usual unblockable attacks, just about everything can be parried to open enemies up to a world of hurt or instant kills. Thankfully Ubisoft seem to have taken into account that not everyone, yours truly especially, might like or be good at parrying and have made certain that the rest of your repertoire is just as effective as a one-hit kill. Make no mistake, mastering the parry will go a long way to making combat easier, but you can still be a force to be reckoned with without ever using it.
As you spelunk your way through Mount Qaf, you’ll have to upgrade your equipment and choose your loadout carefully to survive the escalating difficulty. Sargon’s weapons can be upgraded to deal more damage but the most noticeable changes come in the form of various amulets with different effects that you can equip. The level of customisation is noteworthy as it works as a sort of character build, letting you focus on amulets that help to determine how you approach combat.
It can be a no-brainer to focus on increased health and damage but there’s enough variety in amulets to make you stop and think whether or not that increased damage for lower health is worth it. As with your weapons, amulets can be upgraded.
Sargon also has a bunch of supers at his disposal. These Athra abilities can be charged by taking or dealing damage. You can only have two equipped at a time so choosing them wisely is important. There are healing pools you can deploy, mass damage-dealing dashes or aerial bombardments at your disposal and they can often make the difference in a fight.
Prince of Persia The Lost Crown comes with multiple difficulties and two guide modes to aid in its accessibility. But even at its default setting, Prince of Persia The Lost Crown is quite challenging both in the platforming and, especially, the combat. Later enemies have access to some of the same dashing and parrying moves as you and combat becomes a dance or speed and skill while the platforming can throw out some white knuckle moments of precision and timing at you.
If you die, and you probably will a bit, you’ll instantly respawn at the last Wak-Wak tree you used. These are the game checkpoints and the only place you can change your loadout. However, if you miss a jump in platforming and plummet into spikes below, you’re instantly teleported back to the last platform you jumped from with a little knock to your health.
Visually Prince of Persia The Lost Crown is a stunning game. Environment and character design are first class, pulled together with stunning animation and a stylised feel that doesn’t skimp on the epic vistas. Combat and cut scenes are punctuated with fantastic visual effects and some stunning splashes of comic-inspired colour as you take massive damage or lay the final beat down on a boss.
Prince of Persia The Lost Crown doesn’t reinvent the Metroidvania wheel, but it does make the mechanics entirely its own. You can pick up all of the inspirations, but it never feels like anything less than its own thing and is a perfect fit for the Prince of Persia franchise. Ubisoft has started off 2024 with a fantastic, must-play game that is, not only, one of their best games but also one of this year’s best. If this is the future of the Prince of Persia franchise, well then, could I please have some more?
Prince of Persia The Lost Crown Trailer
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