Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (Review)

My story with this game is long and bloody, but the short version is I got this game at launch on 360 and experienced a mindblowingly terrible game breaking unfixable glitch so I traded it on goozex. The game hasn't been doing the best and I found it at Target for 20 bucks new and decided to play it on PS3 because the 360 version is not playable for me.

For those of you that don't know PoPTFS is a return to the old style PoP games. In the timeline of the series it follows "The Sands of Time" and is before "Warrior Within." I've read a lot of negatives about this game and while I can say that some of them do hold true the game didn't get the credit it deserved.

Graphically the game isn't overly impressive, but does look good. For some reason though the Prince looks like a caveman, but at least the original voice actor is back and Nolan North (from the cell shaded reinvention of 2008) is out! There's something fun in hearing the Prince's thoughts spoken out loud and his sarcasm is back in full swing.

I won't bother telling the story aspect in much detail, but as you could have guessed an all consuming sand army was released to help the Prince and his brother, Malik, fight off invaders, but of course it was a terrible idea and now the Prince has to get Ratash and the sand army back in prison.

Combat has been much improved over previous entries and there are plenty of enemies to fight at once. Many times throughout the game you'll fight between 20-50 enemies at once which is a lot of fun, but the combat is never very challenging. This is due to the fact that the enemies are retards and when you take their retardation into account with your ball busting powers they're really no match for the Prince.

Platforming finally isn't super easy! I was let down the first couple hours of the game because the platforming in some ways is very easy. It seems almost impossibly to mess up jumps most of the time unlike the older versions. Luckily, the game throws in some very nice curve balls of freezing water and "memory recollection" to make platforming much harder and makes it feel like your actually working hard and concentrating for perfect timing to nail huge jump sections. Definitely some of the best platforming in the whole series and some of the most "holy crap I made it" platforming I've ever played in any game.

RPG? Unlike previous entries there is a leveling up system to combat and powers and it's not a huge deal, but does add some depth to the game.

While the game does feel "meaty" it's not a long campaign. I clocked in probably around 6 to 7 hours and did everything. It's about as long as the new Splinter Cell campaign, but I liked PoP more overall.....and this doesn't have a tacked on lame coop section.

Overall, I really enjoyed this outing with the Prince and while I can't say it's my all time favorite of the series it's definitely a great game that got unfairly beaten up in reviews. Get it if you're a fan of the Prince.