Media in Review: Prince of Persia - The Lost Crown
I really, really would like nothing more than to say "Welp, Ubisoft Montpelier did it again." Rayman Origins and Legends are both fantastic games, easily holding up against the titans of the genre. Frankly, the fact that Ubisoft made a new Prince of Persia at all, let alone one that was good, is something that we should probably celebrate. And yet, it's hard not to walk away from it at least a little disappointed? For everything it does well (and believe me, there are many things), it stumbles into a lot of easily avoidable pitfalls that prevent me from rating it higher that somewhere around an 8/10.
Let's start with the good: it runs well (60 FPS+ on all platforms, including Switch), and the platforming is about as good as you would expect with the Rayman Legends team on the case. The game also gets a surprisingly amount of mileage from a fairly short and standard set of power-ups - the only real curveball is the "teleport to an echo of you" and its upgrade "teleport to your chakram", joining an air dash, double jump, and grapple hook. Despite this, the game still takes 15-20 hours to clear, easily jumping up to 30-ish if you feel compelled to complete the map and do all the sidequests. I had my fill after 18 hours and 80% map completion, but there's plenty to do for those who are inclined.
The combat also deserves praise for being way more involved than it has any need to be, but it's pretty great to play. Someone on the dev team clearly wanted to make a fighting game, because Sargon's move list is very lengthy, and each of your powers extends those options. Some have obvious implications like the grapple or air dash, but even the weirder ones like the echo teleport let you do things like charge up an attack, make an echo, release the charge attack, and then go back in time to your echo and release that same attack again. And let's not forget that you can parry almost anything, including one boss fight that basically just becomes an elaborate parry battle as you both fly around the arena.
The bosses, however, are generally one of the worst bits of the game. The standout one is the aforementioned flying parry boss (the second to last one, unfortunately), but I also liked one that was clearly riffing on Kratos from God of War. Aside from that, they're all some combination of "memorize all the boss attacks, stupid" and "no that's an unblockable attack that you have to avoid, you can't just dodge that!" The most notable boss is one about 2/3 of the way in that is clearly Just Vergil™ (in the same way that said later one is Just Kratos™), and has a habit of filling the screen with shit you cannot possibly avoid. My favorite moment is one in which he rewound time after I had hit him a few times, trapped me in a bubble that made me move in slow motion, and then immediately busted out a 5-hit whirlwind that covered the entire screen. He's not the worst boss in the game (that honor goes to the giant snake, imo), but he's definitely the one I had the least fun fighting.
Related, the difficulty is all over the place. It starts with a pretty solid curve, has a massive jump around the Vergil and snake bosses, then becomes inexplicably easy by the end, to the point where I first-tried the final boss (literally the only boss I did so). The game is also pretty glitchy? I ran into a couple notable ones, including a crash relatively early on, Vergil just stopping in the middle of the fight and being unable to proceed past phase 2 of his boss fight, and a sidequest that did not work. Some (hopefully all?) of these have been patched since I wrote this review, and I'll probably play around a bit and update this review once I play the story DLC, but buyer beware all the same. I should also give a special shout out to the trap rooms, which lock you in and throw a bunch of spike rollers at you until you either dodge them all or get hit and start the whole thing over. The worst of them is something like three minutes long, and it is absolute torture.
This probably sounds like I'm really negative on the game, but that's only because the actual platforming and exploration is really good. The boss fights really are the big thing dragging it down, and I would love to see either a reworked version of them or a sequel with the opportunity to iron out some of these flaws. I don't think I would want this to be the direction that Prince of Persia takes forever, but it really feels like they could make an all-time banger if they got one more crack at it. For now though, the Prince is back and we take those wins.