Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands - at last the PoP I've been waiting for!

Gah! This game shows exactly what's wrong with the games industry IMO.

Ubisoft make an outstanding title in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Critical acclaim and whatnot, the players love it. All 3 of them because most people didn't buy it due to a lack of guns, grey and gore. I loved the game, played it several times now. The game steadily becomes something of a cult classic and sells more copies as time goes by.

So Ubi make a sequel, Warrior Within, with grey, gore, wailing teenage goth angst, and giant boobs. The reviewers all cry out in horror about the destruction of the original game's amazing atmosphere and charm, as do the original players. It sells better. However lots of people are calling for a return to Sands' style. I have never made it past the opening 2 hours because the entire thing is so repellent to me. The opening is one of the most acutely embarrasing game sequences I've suffered through in all my years of playing.

So Ubi try again with Two Thrones, bringing back some colour and toning down the angsty nonsense. It's goes down decently enough with both players groups and sells well enough. Reviewers say it's no Sands but are reasonably favourable. Again, everyone calls for a return to Sands' style. I kind of lost interest in this one midway through.

In 2008 Ubi do a reboot on the series and change lots of things. The world goes nuts complaining about trivial, mostly cosmetic things like the sands of time rewind being replaced by a cutscene which kicks in automatically, and fails to mention the important things i.e. that the new 'easy and idiot proof' controls are so counterintuitive and awkward that they cause the player to die more times in one level than in all 3 previous games combined. Yet again everyone calls for a return to Sands' exact style. I put this one down midway through before the rage its controls induced in me led to something being smashed. And I don't do violent temper tantrums. Dreadful controls.

So Ubi release The Forgotten Sands. It's a return to Sands of Time's concept: Arabian Nights story telling, pretty colourful places, a prince with wit instead of gurning game hero sarcasm, and beautiful platforming. It's the game people have been asking for over and over for years.

What happens?

The reviewers all pan it as being too similar to Sands. :wall:

The gamers refuse to buy it because it didn't get good review scores and/or is too similar to Sands and/or is too short.:wall:

Gah! Gah says the frog! It's a wonderful game, best in the series since Sands and in some ways I like it more! The acrobatics flow much more smoothly despite being more complicated; it's a glorious feeling to run and jump through these areas.

The new abilities (freeze water into a surface you can use as a platform for acrobatics, restoring single sections of ruined architecture) combine with the traditional gameplay to make some complex action. While the game starts out quite tamely, by the latter half it's not unusual to need to freeze water to gain support for one jump, unfreeze it the instant the Prince lets go so you can fly through a sheet of water (the flow power makes all water solid) and then reactive it on the other side so you can catch hold of a second plume of water that's now a column. And then to keep performing faster and more complex variations on this, adding in other elements like phasing scenery in and out of the past.

The Prince is upgradable and you select your upgrades. Bad at combat? Pick health and damage upgrades. Bad at platforming? Pick upgrades which give you more rewind chances and more time when using the flow gauge. Want to be flashy? Pick the combat magic. I like it. It's nice to tailor the Prince to my own needs.

There is this rather exhilarating series of set pieces where you make your way through the palace as a massive fire djinn blows the place up around you. It's pure instinct - you don't have time to assess the jumps and plan the route, and it's some very complex platforming. Yet I didn't make a single mistake. The controls and system works so well there was no need to think and plan, only to spot what needed doing and do it.

In fact I find that a good general rule for the game - don't think, do. The more I try to analyse and use caution the more I fail. The trick is trusting. Inching through traps gets me skewered. Picking my moment and hurling myself through in a headlong series of improved, reactionary dodges and rolls sees me with nary a scratch.

NB on the short game point: it's about the same length as Sands, which is to say around 8 hours on a first run. Which is to say about standard for this type of game, and the same sort of length these games have been for well over a decade. It's about the right length for itself. Any more and it would start to feel padded.

Yes, the combat is not great. The combat is never great, right back to ye olde original Prince of Persia in the days of MS DOS. Combat is not what these games are about! Yet it's constantly referenced by people who miss the entire point. Oh no, 8% of the gameplay, a type seen in thousands of games, is average to poor but the other 92% is excellent and of a kind not seen in many games - the game's bad! Run for the hills, folks!

I can't believe people are panning the story either. It's very much in the style of the Arabian Nights, just like Sands was. It's well acted, nicely told, and a far sight better than the generic soldiers with guns pap that's filling many games.

How silly is the reaction to this game? It’s so silly that people say the Prince's voice actor is not a patch on the one from Sands. It's the same person! And he sounds identical! Delivering similarly written lines! In a similar context! There is no difference!

Music's good too. I left the pause screen up for ages yesterday just to listen to that music.

I'm near the end of the game now. I'm intending to play it through a second time once I finish, which is meaningful because I have a stack of titles I really want to be playing and I picked Forgotten Sands to play first because it's the shortest, not because I expected to like it most or anything like that. I've got a lot I want to move onto ... the idea of running through the palace again even more smoothly and elegantly than the first time is just so appealing!

In a rather weird parallel to the series' storyline, things are starting to play out like the time rewinds you perform many times in the games. Ubi made some mistakes and hit the rewind button to go back and have another go. It's all going to repeat - the charming game failing to sell, the twisting of its fabric as its aimed at the masses to wring more numbers out of it, the attempts to compromise between style and sales ... One day, if they rewind enough times, maybe they'll make the charming game and people will actually buy the darned thing!