Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

The story from Forgotten Sands is placed between Sands of Time and Warrior Within and it is extremely thin. It seems that the price in position of a kid, a little smarter after the events from Sands of Time, hits over the eternal recycled invasion of a weak kingdom, used as a negative catalyst since four games ago. In this case, the kingdom of Malik, his older brother. This theme of brother love, jealousy and loyalty, were explored way better in a pack of other stories, here it exists only by the name. Ironically, even the recent blockbuster from Disney has more alive and clean-cut characters.



The plot spins around a new reckless decision, which this time does not free an army of demons made out of sand (Sands of Time) or some ancient evil entity which represents all the evil of the world (Prince of Persia 2008), but an army of demons made out of sand which are led by an evil entity which represents all the evil from the world. And that's about it related to this good computer games. The character is a djinn with a low-cut neck, and the new mechanics comes under the shape of some powers obtained successively along the adventure.

In fact, this is the strength of Forgotten Sands - the multitude of fireworks the platform gains thanks to the prince's skills. You can freeze the water, evoke platforms or walls, etc. And when all these skills are put together into one single series of jumps you will understand what I am saying when I say that I appreciate this Prince of Persia as being the most interesting one from the platform point of view.

What's fair, there are no special traps or complicated obstacle systems. Besides the elemental skills which alternate the world, nothing substantially new has been introduced, and the difficulty of the security systems is indisputable, especially if you increased the life bar, which allows you to make mistakes without waking back to the checkpoint.

On the other side, the running and jumping sessions' architecture is meticulously executed which is hard to ignore, maybe the only dissatisfaction is that the track is never complicated. It is varied, the learning curve is convenient and you have to excuse to ever staying put: the next platform is always obvious and natural. Even if we don't own the dagger anymore, we still have the ability to play with time, but with this not being the central element of this good computer game, there are no other ways to manipulate this concept.



The problem is that you don't have that excitement like in Sands of Time or Warrior Within, where even on the backtracking parts you were motivated by a part of the story: a new hypothesis in the theory of destiny change, a princess to save (or beat, depending on the moment), an evil vizier in possession of the greatest artifact, etc.