Although the platforming in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was
mostly decorative, it got me in the mood to play a PS2-style Prince of
Persia game again, and luckily The Forgotten Sands was just sitting
there ready for me to play it. And while the game definitely felt like
Ubisoft cared more about getting it out quickly than polishing it to a
shine besides the nice jump to HD visuals for the Sands of Time sub-series, it was still a very entertaining game, at least when you were running on walls and jumping from object to object.
The game supposedly takes place between the first and second in the
Sands of Time trilogy, although it doesn't make a particular effort to
fit into that story besides giving the prince the limited ability to go
back in time and mentioning a couple people like Farah. The prince is
visiting his brother's kingdom somewhere, and he gets there during the
middle of a siege on his castle, which gets interrupted when his brother
foolishly unleashes yet another sand-based evil power he didn't
understand, which awakes a bunch of monsters that turn everyone except
the two brothers (protected by amulets) into sand. So the prince has to
save everybody, while picking up new abilities over time and trying to
keep his brother from being corrupted. It's pretty standard middle east
fantasy stuff, and while it doesn't hurt the game, it didn't make me
want to finish it either - I kept playing because I liked the gameplay,
not because I gave a crap about why things were happening. Not a big
deal for a video game to have a boring story, but it did feel like a
step down after a few previous Prince of Persia games spent so much time
developing relationships between the Prince and another character. The
supporting characters here didn't have much going on.
The platforming is where it's at, and the game delivers, feeling pretty
familiar to fans of the series, even if the controls aren't quite the
same. The prince can jump and run up and along walls and grab poles and
ledges and beams, and he has to use these abilities to avoid deathtraps
and traverse otherwise impassable terrain and solve elaborate yet simple
puzzles. He quickly gains the ability to reverse time for several
seconds to undo mistakes, and later powers such as freezing running
water so he can use it to aid his acrobatics, eventually upping the
complexity of his stunts to a level I don't quite remember the previous
games reaching. The strength of the series has always been making the
prince climb and leap all over the place, and they do a great job of
recapturing that here.
Unfortunately, the combat is definitely not up to the challenge, though
at least it doesn't seem to obstruct progress as often as in previous
games. Still, for a series that's always had issues making fighting
monsters as interesting as running around, to see them produce the least
fun system they've had yet was pretty frustrating. The new system
consists of swatting away large groups of boring enemies with a very
simple combo system and a few elemental powers that you can buy upgrades
for, but which fail to provide much entertainment to the dull process
of whacking a bunch of ineffectually aggressive bad guys until they all
fall down. The boss fights are boring also, rarely anything more than
hacking at some giant dude's feet while he takes swings at you and you
get mobbed by a bunch of generic enemies at the same time. Eventually
the game integrates attacking enemies into the platforming, but it never
becomes a particularly interesting element of such, and you're left
with yet another wasted attempt at making this side of the series nearly
as fun as the other.
Like I mentioned a bit before, the production values of the game are
decent enough in comparison to the older games, and The Forgotten Sands
definitely feels like a budget title more than pretty much anything else
I've played on the PS3. While it has better platforming than the last
attempt at reinventing Prince of Persia, that still had a look of its
own that only this generation of hardware could produce, while The
Forgotten Sands looks like they just bumped up the polygon count and
lighting effects. The voice acting is nothing special, the music is
forgettable, and the sound effects are unreliable at best. It's a fairly
buggy game too - repeatedly things that should have worked didn't, and
it seemed to get sloppier as it went on. If this had been positioned as a
AAA title it probably would have been massively disappointing, but
knowing that it was basically pushed out to coincide with the movie and
paying less than $20 to get it a year later, with expectations in check,
I was mostly pleased with the game. I wanted some fun acrobatic
platforming, and I got it, even if everything around it wasn't quite up
to snuff.
