Review: Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is still one of the best platforming games on the PC and while UbiSoft has repeatedly tried to match the charm and flow of the original, every sequel so far has failed to match the original. The whole series feels like an exercise in trial and error as to what made Sands of Time work so well. But Ubi isn't giving up - enter Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

With a launch almost simultaneously with the Prince of Persia movie, one might imagine that we would get a direct movie tie-in. That is not the case - the story of Forgotten Sands has nothing to do with the movie. Instead we get a new story set somewhere between Sands of Time and Warrior Within. The story kicks off as the Prince travels to visit his brother, Malik and runs into a problem - Malik's kingdom is under attack by a massive army.




Malik has a bright idea to defeat the invaders by releasing King Solomon's Army, locked away under the palace for eons. An army, that turns out to be creatures made of sand, as numerous as the grains of sand in the desert. If this sounds like a partial re-run of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, you would be right - however, at least this time the Prince is not the one to blame for the disaster, even if he ultimately does have to sort out the mess his brother unleashes.

As the story starts to roll, the first fundamental problem becomes clear. The Forgotten Sands is very much a "cinematic", scripted affair where you are constantly tossed about by increasingly implausible random events. The magical seal used to release the army just happens to split into two. Both Prince and Malik just happen to end up with one half of it. Then the Prince just happens to be separated from Malik as the sand army is released and, as by random chance (read: the on-rails environment offered no other path) the Prince runs across a portal to a magical domain where he finds a Djinn, Razia, who seems to have all the answers. Razia bestows the Prince with the power of rewinding time (just like the dagger in Sands of Time) and explains that the Prince must find his brother and unite the two halves of the seal to undo the whole mess.

Both games help out the player to figure out the route. Sands of Time used foreshadowing clips of future events while Forgotten Sands goes with a very detailed fly-through of each area - yet there is a subtle difference between the two and in Forgotten Sands there is never any doubt as to what route you need to take - there is always just one available route and it is spelled out without any ambiguity. This downgrades the experience into an exercise in controlling your character - no thinking or problem-solving required - save for a couple of puzzles that are a nice break from the linear platforming action.