Prince of Persia is one of the better known gaming franchises in recent memory, spawning off numerous titles over a various array of consoles, even receiving a blockbuster movie from Jerry Bruckheimer. Over the course of its lifetime it’s had its fair share of ups and downs, but gamers have mostly forgotten the small amount of bad and focused on the much bigger greatness of the series. Is Prince of Persia going to be lumped in with the good? Or cast into the bargain bin of bad? More importantly, does it hold up with the rest of the classic Prince of Persia games? Read on after the jump.

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is set in the seven year gap between The Sands of Time and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. The game starts out by throwing the player into a huge raging battle in the palace. Your brother Malik and his army (as well as his kingdom) are falling, and in order to save it he calls upon an unknown force deep within the palace walls. This releases an incredibly strong army risen and made from the sand, hell bent on killing King Solomon. Too bad he’s already dead. The sand monsters really don’t care though, they just want to run amok killing people. They do so by touching soldiers and draining their energy, ultimately turning them into sand statues you’ll see throughout the game. With each soldier killed it allows the army to create even more sand mummies from the earth, and it’s up to the Prince to save the day and send the hell demons back to their sand vajajay-I mean tomb.

The gameplay of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands hearkens back to fan-favorite elements of the original series. The Prince has the ability to rewind time from the very beginning of the game, essentially saving you some frustration while learning the somewhat tricky control scheme. Pretty soon after the first couple of levels, you’ll learn new powers and the controls will become second nature. The best of these new features is the new elemental power to solidify and use water to your advantage. You’ll spider-monkey climb up columns of water and sprint up waterfalls to get to your objectives. It’s a new dimension to the core gameplay that is very cool, not only in how it looks, but also in how these powers interact with the Prince’s other abilities. As you progress you will enter portals to meet a djinn named Razia, who will give you other minor powers to help you. As you progress through the game, you can purchase and enhance the Prince’s unlocked abilities by defeating enemies and collecting XP. These minor powers include a rock shield and the power to engulf your enemies in flames as you touch them in combat. All of these powers are useful as in some cases you will fight up to 50 enemies in a single battle^.

The combat and combo system to fight all those numerous enemies feels incredibly solid and fluid. You’ll eventually learn that creating space for yourself by kicking off would-be attackers is essential, and finding ways to jump around to keep yourself from being too overwhelmed is key. Running along walls and shimming up poles can sometimes be a great experience in the game, but I came away feeling frustrated and wishing they had done a better job with the wall-run controls. Often times I headed straight for the wall I needed, only to slightly be off and have the Prince run up the adjacent wall (the wrong one). Apparently you have to hit the wall straight on in the middle of it to get it right, holding the right trigger/R2 button to run up it. For Prince of Persia where you get a real sense of flow and parkour feel in the game, having to rewind time because I ran up the wrong wall and jumped off the edge is frustrating.

Overall, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands turned out to be a solid game. They could have done a better job with the character design of the Prince’s head (he looks like a weird lion with a huge forehead), there are a few minor control quirks, but if those are my only beef with the game, Prince of Persia boils down to a great gaming experience. I smiled at my TV at one point and got excited around the 6 hour mark after battling this huge satanic demon monster. I thought it was the end game boss (he’s big enough and bad enough to be one). After beating him I realized I wasn’t done, I was only halfway through the game. Now that I know this, I can’t wait to go through the booby-trapped hallways again in a second playthrough, and there is definitely something to be said about that.

[A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes.]