With the release of Prince of Persia the Sands of Time in theaters everyone knew it wouldn’t be long before a video game tie-in was released. Which makes Prince of Persia the Forgotten Sands a unique creature. It’s a game based on a movie based on a game. As such it has quite a stigma attached to it from the start. Movie licensed video games have almost as bad a reputation as movies based on games. I personally feel the Prince’s first cinematic outing was actually pretty decent, but how’s the game?
Forgotten Sands eschews the movie’s plot and takes place instead during the seven year gap between Sands of Time and Warrior Within. Its tied directly into the game series continuum which should makes fans of the series a bit happier. The game is thus less a licensed tie in then it is a sequel that just happens to coincide with a movie release. However its obvious the movies development prompted this games creation and it didn’t have the same kind of development time and polish as the origianls. As for the actual story. Once again the Prince is involved in the release of an ancient power, and must fight to undo the evil that’s been done and restore order to the kingdom. This time around its an evil army of sand demons who fought and were imprisoned by Solomon. Time travel again plays an integral part, this time as a result of Djinn elemental magic. And in the end the Prince must face and defeat the evil efrit Ratash and seal him and his army away.
Though a somewhat cliched plot its well written. And the game uses the same voice actor for the Prince as previous endeavors which helps again to tie it closer to the game continuum. All the voice actors do excellent jobs and the dialogue sounds very natural. Of course the game only really has four main characters so you’d pretty much expect that.
Like all games in the Prince of Persia series the primary focus of the game is on platforming puzzles. And in this area the game shines. The controls and animations are smooth and fluid and the Prince has his normal repertoire of tricks. Stringing wall runs, incredible jumps, flips, and other tricks together as you navigate the paths through each level is beautiful to watch and a blast to perform just like the games predecessors.
Combat on the other hand is a bit weaker. It’s been a common problem with the series from the beginning really. Combat has always been a secondary concern. The combat system is a fairly simple affair, you start out with both a basic attack and a charge power attack. Additional attack skills are unlocked as you gain experience along with a variety of elemental powers. However for all the options the game may give you there really isn’t any reason to use most of them. In most cases you find yourself facing large hordes of enemies in fairly confined spaces which make working your way into the more complicated combos without an enemy attack breaking the chain rather difficult. It’s also rather unnecessary since you face a fairly limited variety of villains and almost all of them can be dealt with easily via the basic attack. Though relatively fun the combat simply doesn’t have the same kind of flair as the platforming sections and really just fill in the space between each puzzle.
Graphically the game looks good, not the best looking game this year but serviceable. As the second Prince of Persia game on this generation of consoles the game isn’t quite as pretty as the last years offering. Part of that being that the areas themselves are a bit smaller and closed in and don’t have nearly as much variety. The character models do look good though and as I said all the animations are very smooth. Its a step up from the PS2 games from earlier in the series but I fell that had it had some more time they could have made it truly eye popping.
Now Sands of Time is considered a classic by many; Forgotten Sands on the other hand is fun but ultimately fails to live up to the strong pedigree of its predecessors. It’s not a bad game by any means, but being the sequel of such well crafted adventures places it under a great pressure to preform and it simple doesn’t reach the same level. It’s well worth a rental, especially if you’re a fan of the series, but I can’t recommend it as a must buy.