12 June 2023 , 21:09
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We’ve gone hands on with the latest Prince of Persia game at Ubisoft Forward – and the switch in perspective seems like a smart move so far.
Easily one of the biggest surprise announcements at last week’s Summer Games Fest was the news that a new Prince of Persia game would launch in January 2024. Equally surprising was the fact that it wasn’t the one we were expecting.
Because while the ground-up Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake currently suffers from a protracted development, the team at Ubisoft Montpelier – most known for Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends – have once again been tapped for their 2D platforming prowess. And from the 30 minutes I got to play, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is so far a smart reworking of the franchise – just on a slightly smaller scale.
The first thing to clear up is to establish where The Lost Crown sits in the universe. Is it a continuation of The Sands of Time saga, or perhaps a riff on the ideas laid out in 2008’s cell-shaded reboot? The answer is neither. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is in fact its own standalone game, albeit with some stylistic and thematic trimmings first introduced in the former. Sargon is a totally distinct warrior, working for the prince rather than being one who, complete with angsty attitude and haircut, must zip through an interconnected map of many biomes to try and restore order to the titular historical land alongside his Avengers-like group of Immortals.
My demo began with me starting in an early chapter of the game, in an appropriately ancient temple located within the dusty mountain of Mount Qaf. The controls felt instantly intuitive despite me being given no official onboarding, with spamming the X button seeing Sargon dish out snappy quick attacks by blade and Y equally letting me pepper at skeletal enemies instantly from afar. He’s also equipped with a slide activated with a tap of the right trigger, while the left trigger’s block is expectantly used for a counter. Literally within five minutes of getting my hands on the control, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown just felt right to play.
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The counter is especially fun and satisfying to pull off, particularly when an enemy is low on health and the screen briefly enters slo-mo, letting Sargon colour the screen in the stylized, inky blood of his foe against the temporarily black-and-white surroundings. It’s clear that while the scale has been shrunken down to accommodate the 2.5D perspective, the extra time this approach affords Ubisoft Montpelier has allowed the studio to embed lashings of style.
Line in the sand
The simple act of navigating this version of a time-warped Persia – where all things past, present and future appear to be happening at once – feels equally nimble and responsive. Swinging around poles, jumping off walls, sliding underneath fallen structures… The Lost Crown has it all and so far demonstrates a great use of its level design. And while the developer seems hesitant to call the game a strict ‘Metroidvania’, there were plenty of inaccessible areas in the two biomes I was able to explore in the demo that hint players will be returning to locations on more than one occasion.
The emphasis here isn’t on gaining new abilities that lets Sargon access previously blocked-off areas, because he starts out fairly capable almost immediately. Rather the approach is on buffing his existing skills, as evidenced with the amulet system. You see, at any point when reaching a checkpoint (depicted as a golden tree) you can swap in and swap out different amulets with different attributes that enhance Sargon’s aspects in certain ways. Want to prioritize defence over increasing the effectiveness of your teleport ability? There’s sure to be an ideal amulet combination.
The amulet system in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is joined by Sargon’s ability to have two special abilities equipped which, when you’ve dealt enough damage or blocked enough attacks to build up your focus meter, can be trigged to perform a killer blow or offer health benefits. The latter was a level two ability that took some time to built up, but came in especially handy during the demo’s end boss fight that proved particularly tough. Entering the block pose and pressing the Y button on my controller saw Sargon throw down a potion that generated a health field, stepping into which helped keep me in the fight for longer than I otherwise would been.
In case it wasn’t already clear, this is a title that squeezes a surprising amount of depth into its combat and exploration, despite what the shrunken-down Prince of Persia scale would have you believe. The aforementioned boss fight against a lion-faced griffin served to reinforce this, tasking me to slide underneath him, wall jump around and regularly counter (with perfect timing) just in order to stand a chance at defeating him. All in all the encounter took my five tries, and that was while playing on PC on a curved screen with a solid controller. Usually I like playing Metroidvanias on Switch, but I’d worry I’d be forcing the console’s buttons too hard if played there.
After 30 minutes exploring two biomes and defeating one boss enemy, I came away from my Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown demo wanting to see more. It’s a very different approach to the themes and world featured in the franchise before, true, but at the same time it exudes the same affection and appreciation for these classic hallmarks. It being a 2.5D Metroidvania, where you don’t play as the prince, going up against an antagonist who is the one with time manipulation powers this time around, tells me to expect the unexpected. And the fact that it’s specifically Ubisoft Montpelier at the helm should make everyone else equally as excited.