Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands

(Simple, dumb trailer for PoP:Forgotten Sands. Shows how much flashier and overblown things have to be now in order to make one of the royal family run across walls and into the arms of legions of sand monsters.)

So, to cash in on the poorly thought out PoP film (seriously, did you guys even PLAY the game or did you just base the movie off the box art?!), Ubisoft in all their immense wisdom released a retconning sequel to the original game that phases out the existence of PoP2 & PoP3.

Messy, but effective if they're going to drive their brand name into a specific direction. But that direction seems to be poorly trying to ape the original game, think a slightly BETTER idea than Superman Returns, but still as ludicrously stupid. Now, before I sound too harsh, I popped FS into my 360 and only stopped when I realized I needed to get ready for work because it was now morning. Morning three days later.


(Blah, blah, Blah... shut up and show him rewinding after a painful death involving spikes and saw blades. These Ubisoft tools write all kinds of checks that the game itself can't cash, but they touch on some comparative notes and give some looks at what the gameplay itself actually looks like.)

The lion's share of the elements that made PoP into a phenomenon rather than JUST a game are still present like the EVIL punishing platform puzzles, parkour style crowd combat (a minor revision to the original), mystical powers over elemental forces, the ability to freeze water solid to use as climbing and jumping surface and most importantly the ability to rewind time in order to solve puzzles and save the Prince from one of the many gruesome deaths you'll certainly suffer scrambling about the castle in this game.

I managed to snag it for $8 from Gamefly in a sale and if I'd known it could be this fun and addicting, I would have bought it outright on the day of release at full price. I'm surprised they never threw together a demo to showcase this thing.

Then again, there is the issue of them having a buttload of bugs present like floors being choosy as to whether they're tangible or not. It is rife with weird glitches and worse still, the Prince has to be independently "smart" from the player because he is constantly adjusting to the terrain and surfaces he's navigating so half the process in the gameplay is trusting him to catch a beam, out-climb a saw blade in a wall or NOT to spring off a ledge to his death so commands will make him do a number of different things based on different context, thankfully the game has a near-perfect learning curve, but expect the bugs to appear at any time.

Now I'd say that at least 80% of my gruesome deaths turned out to be pilot error because I don't know when to NOT hit the jump button while traversing a chasm wall or something shiny caught my attention and I didn't focus on where the Prince was or misjudged a a jump's timing making it quite certainly my own damn fault.

The again, 20% of them were because ledges, beams and surfaces were not recognized by the Prince mid-jump and he plummeted to his death without my help. Sometimes platforms would forget to exist and he'd fall through the floor for no reason and sometimes frozen stuff doesn't stay frozen per se during his many, murderous platforming puzzles depending on your ability to navigate across a room using only sheets of flowing water as jumping surfaces and leaks within the room as beams. Most of the game works like a swiss watch, but when the buggy stuff made itself known during the water platforming puzzles I was less than pleased.

In the end, I really REALLY enjoyed Forgotten Sands, warts and all. I even recommend it. My primary gripes that sit with the game are the fairly stupid writing and mildly generic "me too!" feel that stems from a clumsy attempt at revising better written and already existing (game) history. And THEN there's also the bug riddled mess of the game itself, which is fairly minimal when you find yourself sucked into the game as you leap from frozen sheets of water, scramble past rolling saw blades and land in the middle of thirty sand zombies as you wield elemental spells, saving yourself with rewind powers and cutting a path of awesome through normal and aerial sword attacks.

It's pretty freaking cool. I never finished Sands of Time, but I'm hoping to fix that now that Ubisoft put out an HD remake of the original three titles.

Anyway, check Forgotten Sands out and if you like it then you'll be excited by the retroactive gameplay available in the previous titles, particularly Sands of Time. This is 3D platforming at its finest and an excellent example of Ubisoft's greatest asset that defines the majority of their (better) titles, what with all the running, climbing, jumping and hitting stuff.