I bought Prince of Per­sia: The For­got­ten Sands dur­ing my stay in Lon­don over the extended week­end. Today, I had noth­ing to do so I put it in the PS3 and had a go at it. After roughly seven hours I was done. The real play­time is about one hour less and six hours of game­play aren’t all that good for a game like this. The pre­de­ces­sors took me longer. Any­way, let’s see if I can sum­ma­rize my expe­ri­ence a lit­tle better.

I won’t tell you any­thing about the plot. Let’s just say that the sto­ry­line is weak and you surely won’t be absorbed by the nar­ra­tive. The acro­bat­ics and plat­form­ing is up to the Prince of Per­sia stan­dard set by The Sands of Time. The first two hours are pretty easy going but it get’s more chal­leng­ing later on. The prince unlocks new pow­ers like freez­ing water or mak­ing por­tions of ruins seem like they did before they were destroyed. You have to com­bine these pow­ers to get through the later lev­els and this is def­i­nitely more chal­leng­ing than the begin­ning areas. Thanks to the abil­ity to rewind time you improve the odds to beat tricky plat­form­ing areas.

Com­bat is more bor­ing because it mostly con­sists of but­ton smash­ing. The first ene­mies are easy, the later ones are a bit tougher and some­times quite big. With the pow­ers the prince unlocks with his expe­ri­ence points everything’s easy, though. Using these pow­ers requires the same resources as does rewind­ing time so you may  have to be care­ful, depend­ing on your play­ing style. Dur­ing nor­mal game­play you can’t max­i­mize your pow­ers so you should play the game’s chal­lenge modes.

The visu­als of the game aren’t impres­sive at all. The game had poten­tial, though. Some­times, TFS looks really fan­tas­tic which is unfor­tu­nately negated when you arrive at dull look­ing areas. Some areas even look a bit unfin­ished. Seems like the devel­op­ers had a lot of pres­sure fin­ish­ing the game in time which results in this unre­fined game.

Funny side­note: You can unlock addi­tional stuff via Uplay and the devel­op­ers added an Ezio cos­tume (Ezio is the lead char­ac­ter in Assassin’s Creed II).

So, what’s my con­clu­sion? The game is nei­ther bad nor awe­some, but good. It has a solid base but there’s quite a bit of untapped poten­tial hid­den deep within. That makes it bet­ter than the 2008 Prince of Per­sia but that’s it. It’s got good voice act­ing and some inter­est­ing plat­form­ing but com­bat is a dull affair. If I had to rate the game, I’d give it 6 out of 10 points.