Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands - A Review
Posted: 7/4/2010 12:00:00 AM
By: WebPimp

Prince of Persia fans, you will be happy to know that with the rest of the Prince of Persia games, The Forgotten Sands will not disappoint. For starters, you will be playing within the timeline of two other games Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. So if you watched the recently released movie in which the game coincided its release to the masses, you may be disappointed to know you will not be playing the same game/movie topic. This isn’t a bad thing because you won’t be running around the game world wondering if you’re playing a bad Jake Gyllenhaal implementation.

In The Forgotten Sands, you play as a prince to your brother Malik who happens to be having his ass handed to him by a bunch of treasure hunters intent on grabbing some goodies inside of Malik’s palace. Which right from the beginning we wonder how all of these people are going to be paid by divvying up a few gold coins? Anyway, in good brotherly form you come in to help out and your brother feels the best way to take care of the marauding horde is to summon Solomon’s army. As this takes place, things get a little bit messed up and everyone around you and your brother turn into sand statues, thus kicking off the games main set of game play.

Now because you and your brother ended up with halves of the magical seal that brought forth Solomon’s army, you get to absorb the power of the enemies you defeat.  Since you are the younger wiser brother without a kingdom of his own, you find yourself controlling this new found power while your brother gets all power hungry and won’t work with you to reunite the two halves. In the end someone gets hurt, that’s all we’re going to say about the games plot line.  As you move about the game, you will be looking to increase your skill levels in combat and acrobatic movement while solving puzzles as well.

As with all Prince of Persia games, you are going to be doing a lot of wall running and this game is no exception. You will start out with your basic moves of wall running, banner sliding, and post jumping, but that changes quickly. One of the best abilities you will soon receive is the ability to freeze water. Doing so allows waterfalls and any other type of water flow to be frozen giving you new walls and posts to run and jump on. Because you can freeze and unfreeze at will, you will experience some levels that will required you to freeze water, unfreeze it, move through it, and then freeze it again making some puzzles to be tedious in execution, but rewarding when completed.

Game combat will required you to push a button. Repeat that process several times and you will kill a group of enemies. While some people lately have been getting irritated with games that are just button mashers, you have to accept that fact that Prince of Persia has always been about acrobatics than kill everything and anything that comes across your path in sweet dance like kill moves. One tip we will hand your way is getting a hold of the ice sword. This will will help you take care of business with skeletons that surround you, and if you feel overwhelmed, do what the prince does best and run!

The level designs are evident that there was a large and dedicated team working on the environment. This can help sway some of the games hardships in the combat mode but also make your life way fun as you swing from post to post and wall to wall. Unfortunately with this great level design comes a camera system that can sometimes be more of a distraction than anything. Because the camera’s job is to focus on the prince, it seems that it forgets that you need top lay the game still and thus don’t get the views of where you need to go  making jumps sometimes difficult to execute. However this doesn’t happen a lot, but just enough that every now and then you tell yourself that this is messed up and should be fixed.

In the end, you can look at The Forgotten Sands as a good game to sit down for a bit and run through some great acrobatic moves with a little bit of combat mixed in there for good measure. if you are a Prince of Persia veteran, you will feel at home with the game play and if not, you will soon feel at home with it. The games cut scenes are very well done and if we can offer a tip, be sure to watch through the credits to get a feel for what fully happens in the end instead od of thinking that the final boss cut scene is the full end.

3.5 out of 5 Widows