Prince of Persia The Lost Crown - Review
It was when the second game in the Prince of Persia series released, the 1993 game not the Ubisoft one, that I fell in love with the series. It was the Ubisoft Sands trilogy that cemented that love, which is why I was so happy when I heard a new game was coming. It has been 20 years since Ubisoft started their version of the series and The Lost Crown is their first original side-scrolling entry, but does this new perspective embrace the series legacy, or does it end up feeling lost?
The story starts with a bit of an explanation of the state of Persia, as an invading army from the east attempts to take Persepolis. You take up the sword of Sargon, the youngest member of The Immortals, the seven strongest warriors in all of Persia and after killing the enemy general and routing the army, the victorious celebrate their win. However before the drinks can be drunk, word comes through that Prince Ghassan has been kidnapped, so The Immortals set out to chase down the kidnapper and rescue the Persian prince. The only problem, the kidnappers have run to Mount Qaf, the former home of the Persian royal family, before the city was cursed and now monsters and more live among the ruins. Vahram, the leader of The Immortals explains that they need to split up, in order to find the missing Prince, which leads us to explore on our own.
The games style is unequivocally a metroidvania, something the developers have admitted and that means if you love Metroid or Castlevania, you are going to be right at home here. After a lot of climbing and wall jumping, Sargon soon came upon a mysterious tree and a strange little girl, who named the tree a Wak-Wak. These act as your save points and health refill stations, so you will visit them a lot as you progress through the ruined citadel. Eventually, Sargon comes across a statue that has floating in pieces in the sky and at its base a giant purple glowing sphere. Smashing the sphere open breaks whatever curse is going on in the area and resets part of the statue, allowing you to climb up to progress and by this point, you will have a solid idea of the games base mechanics.
There are really two aspects to the game, the exploration, which is fairly standard, you explore locations and make note of places you can’t access yet, so you can return later and combat. The games combat is fairly even between attacking and defending, so much so that if you fail to do the latter, you will die. The game has two basic ways of defending from an attack, there is the dodge where you just get out of the way and the parry, the second being the harder but more rewarding. A successful parry will stagger your opponent for a small time, letting you run in and attack them. Parry’s are not limited to sword on sword, basically anything that comes your way from a spear to an arrow can be parried and again if done right will help you out. If you mistime a parry you will generally take more damage and the end result may not be in your favour, so practicing on the earlier enemies is highly suggested. By the time you reach the Manticore, which is the first big boss, you should be good to have a crack at it, just know that you will likely die at first.
As far as attacking goes, there are two main ways that Sargon can do that, the first is by using his twin blades, which he has named for some reason. The second weapon he gets soon after arriving, along with the discovery that he himself is not just himself, and that is the bow. The bow has a secondary function where it can also be thrown as a Chakram, which is great for activating out of reach switches as well. From the beginning the swords can do some damage, but upgrading them is something I would suggest you aim to do as soon as possible. The game does have a few combos available to you, but I often found them to be kind of pointless, as whilst Sargon was hitting the final stages of an attack, he was unable to respond to any incoming attacks, leaving him somewhat defenceless. By the time I got to the final stages of the game and encountered some more dangerous enemies, I was able to adjust my battle style to suit better, but it was more about my stopping any combos from triggering than anything else.
The exploration was actually not as entertaining for me as I was hoping it would be, don’t get me wrong, it is good, but there was just something missing from it for me. In each region the little girl, Fariba is somewhere and will sell you a map, but she can also be found in a place called the Haven. The first time I bought a map, I thought that I had mostly been to all places in the starting area, only to discover there was a lot I had not seen and as the game went on, some places became insanely large once the map was obtained. Beyond that exploration is mostly done to just get to new areas, as there are not as many secrets as I would have expected in a metroidvania title. There are of course a lot of them, hidden walls, slightly out of sight ledges and such, with the discovery of some of them being quite fun, but the game seemed to delight more with some very twisted platforming sections. There are times that those sections are mandatory, more so towards the end of the game, but during the adventure they are optional and sometimes the reward for getting through the chaos does not feel worth it, especially when you have to go back through it to leave.
Given the game does require some fairly advanced platforming from you at times, now is a good time to talk about the games presentation and performance. Let us begin with the latter, which is mostly rock solid across the experience, just for reference I played the game on Nintendo Switch. The game does run at 60fps both in docked and handheld mode, but there are times when it would stutter. These moments usually came after a big moment in a boss fight, or when leaving a cutscene and then having Sargon run off. They are not enough to impact the gameplay, as I never noticed them whilst platforming, but you will notice them happen when they do. Sadly that was not the only performance issue I had, as the game would constantly play animations when things are not meant to or allow me to trigger an interaction with Sargon not in the right spot. One of those instances had me running in place for 60 seconds, before the game just slid me through the person in my way, it was very peculiar. I also spotted a few times when the worlds geometry didn’t line up correctly, which resulted in lines between elements and again, its not game breaking, however it is immersion breaking.
On the side of the games audio there are two distinct aspects to it one is the orchestral soundtrack and the other is the voice work. I will say this for the voice work, first all the characters sound distinct, even with a number of actors playing multiple parts. The only problem that I have with the voice work is that none of them sound like they are from Persia. Most of them seem to have a British accent and while sure that may have been the standard way of doing things 60 years ago in movies, I'm sure at some point somebody could have thought ‘hey our game is set in Persia let's make sure they speak in the right accent’. There are two things worth calling out about it, the first is that the game does support Farsi which is the modern version of the Persian language, so you can have the game completely in the ‘native’ dialect. The other thing is that with the actors doing the English version, they are actually English, but their ancestry is Middle Eastern, so that is nice at least.
The games score is broken up into two parts, with Iranian composer Mentrix doing one and British composer Gareth Coker doing the other. Coker’s score is mostly used in the narrative elements so cutscenes an big character moments, if you've enjoyed the ori games all the second Mario and rabbits title you'll have a good idea of the grandeur that he provides. Metrics does the gameplay elements so as you're exploring the library or the forest, you get a lot of melodies that fit that area. Having two different composers work on two different aspects could have been a bit of a mess, but as I didn't realise there were two composers until the credits were rolling I would say they did a phenomenal job.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is an excellent game, it features some really tight yet fluid platforming, combat that feels challenging just as the original game did, but not punishing and has a story that offers up a few twists for the player. Where it falls apart is that there are some characters you meet that are completely underused, one character is even reported as being dead at the end of the game and I only saw them three times in my 17 hours playing through it. How the story ends feels cheap but also it's open for more so I can see why they've gone for it, but as it builds to that moment, the payoff feels very anti-climactic. The combat is not going to be for everyone, with the game letting you dictate how challenging things can be, across a number of areas, it shouldn't stop you from playing the game. If you're a fan of the series or of Metroidvania titles, then this is one adventure worthy of a tale of legend.
The Score
8.5
Review code provided by Ubisoft
The Pros
+Fluid motions that work in exploration and combat
+The world has lots to discover, though not quite as much as other games in the genre
The Cons
-The story just kind of ends, with some characters just left without a resolution
-The lack of an on-screen minimap can make navigating the world a little more challenging at times
