The Forgotten Sands Review
The Prince returns to gaming screens across the world in his latest adventure, The Forgotten Sands. Promising fan favourite game-play with a mix of new features The Forgotten Sands should be an easy score for Ubisoft. Unfortunately it feels that so many corners have been cut the game is practically a circle and the Prince has never looked so… plastic.
We begin the journey in the desert. No surprises so far. The Prince is off to see his brother who is apparently going to teach the Prince how to unleash his awesome leader from within. Arriving at his brother’s palace the Prince is greeted with a massive invading army straight out of a Lord of the Rings movie who are hell bent on taking over. The Prince, being a good brother, decides his only option is to enter the palace armed only with a gold medal in gymnastics and a very small sword. His brother meanwhile plans to unleash Solomon’s sand army to repel the attackers.
I don’t have a hard time following the story. It is simple and I like simple. Brother unleashes army, army is evil, need to return army and stop brother from turning into Napoleon. Easy to follow and well suited to the universe that Ubisoft have created. The dialogue is a bit of a mixed bag. If you enjoy Disney movies you’ll be right at home. If you can’t stand the fact that the Prince of Persia sounds like a posh English kid then you might want to skip the dialogue. After a while I found myself just ignoring it anyway.
Speaking of Disney, fans of the Lion King are in for a bit of a treat. For some unfathomable reason the Prince of Persia looks like Simba with a few years of plastic surgery and a healthy coating of gloss. Don’t even get me started on the beard, ugh. It’s a real shame that the Prince didn’t get any lovin’ because there are a lot of very well done cut scenes but these are completely ruined by the Prince’s stupid, half-plastic half-lion emotionless face. You just cannot take him seriously. Have you ever seen Michael Jackson looked surprised? No me neither and it’s the same for the Prince.
Enemies in The Forgotten Sands on the other hand are very well put together and look really cool. The animations are interesting and the cut-scenes, again, are very well made. It’s the same for the environments. Some, most notably the dream room and the outside scenes, look absolutely amazing. The interior isn’t too bad either which is just as well because you are going to be seeing a lot of it. I mean a lot. Dark earthy rooms are not at the top of my list of favourite places to be but it’s not all bad. The various poles, banners and wooden structures that you encounter along the way are enough to ignore the monotony for a while. After which you will take a break and most likely resort to alcohol.
Wall running, swinging from poles and dodging traps look and play very smoothly. It’s definitely a lot of fun in small doses. The animations look great and the climbing environments are interesting and different for most of the game. The physics are a little unbelievable but it’s what you expect when playing Prince of Persia. I had no real problem grasping the controls and before I knew it I was flying around the map like a monkey on amphetamines. Which is great because when it comes to “Prince of Persia†that is exactly what you want and expect. Ubisoft certainly deliver in that department. The acrobatics are fun and sometimes challenging but I couldn’t help but feel a little let down. The game-play is solid but I expected more. Ubisoft didn’t reinvent the wheel here; they barely greased it. If it wasn’t for the Prince’s new ability to freeze water and traverse it then this really would be a big disappointment.
One part of the game I instantly fell in love with was the combat. The animations are simply outstanding. I played through a few hours of The Forgotten Sands and even then the Prince would be finding a completely new way to dismember his foes. It’s not just the animations either, the Prince now controls certain elements such as Water and Fire and can use them in combat. The Water attack launches a line of razor sharp Ice shards at the enemy doing tons of damage and looking pretty cool to boot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJrSXFe2Mhs
As the Prince hacks and slashes his way through the game he gains experience and is able to unlock new abilities. This was probably the only reason I played the game for so long. You want to unlock all the abilities and completely destroy your skeletal adversaries. Or maybe you are saving your skills for one of the games many mini-bosses? These are pretty fun encounters that are simple enough to pick up but exhilarating at the same times. It’s nothing we haven’t seen a thousand times before but it’s a nice treat.
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is a good game that is fun to play. The thing is, we are living in an age of great games and The Forgotten Sands falls way short of that margin. The game feels rushed – which it probably was considering the movie release date – and of the last generation. It is fun to play in the same way it is fun to get the monopoly board from the attic and play some monopoly. It’s a step back in time, a reminder of the good old days and things I used to love. It’s certainly good but nowhere near good enough.