The Prince of Persia games make up for some of my earliest gaming memories, so it has been disappointing to see the franchise sit on the side in recent years. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown brings things back to basics, with a 2D Metroidvania structure, challenging platforming puzzles, slick combat, and a hero who isn’t even the prince this time. It may just be the shot in the arm that the franchise so desperately needs.
You play as Sargon, a member of the Immortals - elite warriors who act as protectors of Prince Ghassan and the kingdom of Persia. The story takes Sargon and the Immortals to the mysterious Mount Qaf to rescue the captive Prince. The youngest of the lot, Sargon, traverses through the twisty mazes of Mount Qaf, collecting new abilities while unthreading a conspiracy that may destabilise the Persian kingdom.
While the game goes back to its 2D side-scrolling roots, it hasn’t forgotten to keep the classic tropes of the more successful Prince of Persia games. It takes inspiration from the Sands of Time trilogy but builds an equally impressive mythology that stands on its own. In classic Prince of Persia fashion, Mount Qaf is experiencing weird anomalies in time, leading to the natural flow of time being disrupted.
At the time of writing, I’ve played about 12 hours of the game, being roughly halfway through the main story. In that time, I’ve unlocked a good chunk of the map, battled a nice variety of foes, and nearly threw my controller at the TV no less than six times. Why? Well, while the platforming challenges are well-designed, the game’s controls leave a lot to be desired, with an emphasis on long animations over functional movement.
You could remap most of the controls here, but nothing would feel ideal compared to what the developers have planned for you. Thankfully, you can customise your play experience with the limited, but powerful accessibility options. Beyond just providing difficulty presets you can tune each dial corresponding to attack output, and dodge timing windows, and there’s even a platform assist toggle that lets you skip the game’s interstitial arenas. I just wish there was a “skip puzzle” option because some of those here can get extremely infuriating.
Let’s start with the movement first - Sargon is an acrobatic warrior who can easily dash through his enemies with little effort. The issue comes from the unpredictability of collision points in the environment. Sargon can effortlessly make long jumps and dashes, and look cool while doing so, but I never felt like I had enough control over the trajectory of his movements.
In combat, you rely on your trusty swords and a bow and arrows, which when combined with your time-based abilities, can result in some slick chaos on screen. Later on, you get a chakram that you can throw and catch like Captain America’s shield, and combined with some of the time powers, you can chain some pretty incredible combos.
However, the overreliance on long animations gives you less control, while the enemies get a free pass to ignore your attacks. Dark Souls is known for its “tough, but fair” combat, and it too requires you to fully commit to the combat animations. However, there is a small window between the animations where you can be invulnerable, known as I-frames, and mastering the timing of those is crucial to winning battles. In The Lost Crown, that latter part seems to be missing.
Too often in the middle of a combo would I see the enemy preparing a strike, and too often I’d be spamming the dodge button in vain. Sargon simply cannot be bothered to stop his attack and roll away. The enemies, simple as their move sets may be, can easily stun-lock you if given the chance. They’ll hit you when you’re healing, throw you off the platform, and refuse to be thrown into the traps below.
The combat design is well balanced otherwise, pushing you just enough to go for that “one last try” before emerging victorious. The window of parrying an attack is small, but it’s rewarding every time you hit that trigger and see Sargon one-shot an enemy in Mortal Kombat-style a fatality. But those appear very infrequently, as the majority of attacks need to be dodged. As the game’s story progresses, you’ll find just sliding under enemies to be a futile exercise, with the game prompting you to take the fight to the air.
Each story act culminates in a wonderful boss fight that puts all the abilities you’ve earned till then to the test. The bosses are fast, with multiple phases requiring you to be adept at mashing the right buttons, facing the right directions. As simple as that sounds, it can get tricky given Sargon’s tendency to switch directions the moment I push the analogue stick by the smallest degree. Unlike Ori or Metroid Prime, switching directions fast in the middle of a combo is not easy, so you’ll have to commit to the moves you’re making before switching your game plan. Even the mini-bosses provide ample challenge, requiring you to keep changing your approach. The enemy variety in general is excellent, which keeps things refreshing.
Besides the usual sword strikes and rush abilities, a lot of Sargon’s skills will depend on the amulets you’ve equipped. Providing passive buffs, the amulets provide a lot of flexibility to change up your play style. Getting upgrades to unlock the slots on your necklace takes time, and within just a few hours, you’ll find a plethora of amulets to be slotted in. The balance feels a little off, but I’d rather take the abundance of options that made me switch up my play style every time I started getting bored with my old moves.
The Lost Crown’s biggest strength is its giant map and the level design in it. Featuring thirteen distinct biomes, Mount Qaf offers a good variety of scenery at good intervals. New areas get unlocked just when you’re about to be bored with the existing zones. The fast travel points come few and far between, and you’ll have to backtrack quite a lot to progress through its many quests. Like any good Metroidvania, the trick lies in balancing the backtracking with careful placements of treasures, unscalable areas, and traps. Fortunately, The Lost Crown does well i
The Lost Crown includes Memory Shards that you can use to take screenshots of areas you’d like to revisit, and these can come in handy when you’ve acquired a new power. The amount of memory shards you can put down is limited, scaling up with the story, but I never seemed to miss using them. I don’t have a photographic memory, but it’s a testament to Ubisoft Montpellier’s genius-level designers that I always had a good idea of my position and was rarely lost. The game features a “semi-open world” which increases in complexity the more you play, but never to the point where you’d need a guide.
The game’s economy system is a simple one that gets the job done, and that’s the best kind. Buying upgrades gets costlier over time, but you can always go back to the previous area to farm more time crystals. If you’re ever stuck, you can buy hints from the side characters.
Like recent Ubisoft games, the game features a “Guided Mode” and “Exploration Mode”. Most conversations point you to the next objective with fairly simple directions, but there were points where I wasn’t clear on the objective, given how easy it is to get sidetracked with so many hidden areas at every corner. The Lost Crown features 9 side-quests that each reward you with useful abilities and a heavy dose of lore about Mount Qaf’s past. These side quests include memorable characters and encounters, and I’d highly recommend completing them, although they do require a fair amount of traversal and map knowledge.
The main story also features enough twists and turns to keep things interesting. With the overall objective of each story arc being simple to follow, the game revels in twisting its characters under the influence of Mount Qaf’s mysterious aura. You’ll fight against otherworldly versions of yourself, betray your comrades, and get betrayed yourself, all without losing sight of the larger picture. The story isn’t as grand in its ambitions as the Sands of Time trilogy, but it’s the personal connections you make with the colourful cast of characters that keep you going.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown PS5 Performance
The game runs exceptionally well on the PS5, rendering at a beautiful 4K resolution with rock-solid frame rates. If you have a TV that supports 120Hz at 4K over HDMI 2.1, then prepare your eyes for a feast. If you have an older TV, fret not, as the game will default back to a 60fps target. Even for those players, toggling the 120Hz option in the console’s settings will let the game run at the higher frame rate at a lower resolution. The game’s art direction is prepared for it, though, and it looks just as good in that mode. I look forward to playing this on the Nintendo Switch, for which this title would be a perfect fit. Just go easy on those Joy-Cons during some of the platforming sections.
I did encounter some frustrating bugs in the review build, which included the day-one patch. After a cutscene ended, Sargon wouldn’t respond to the movement controls, and this was fixed by reloading the save. Given the structure of the game and the nature of manual saves, this cost me a few minutes of progress. I also had the game crash once, and that wasn’t during any intense battle, so we can rule out the intensity of the experience to be a cause. Here’s hoping these issues are fixed by launch, as losing progress in Metroidvania can cause a lot of unnecessary frustration.
In the end, I’ve had and continue to have a great time with The Lost Crown. It’s easily better than the last entry in the franchise, but is it good enough to convince fans to put it on the same pedestal as the 3D games of the past? I’m not sure about that, but that’s a good thing because the game carves out enough of an identity for itself to stand apart. A new age of Prince of Persia games may be upon us, and if that includes more games that offer gameplay as satisfying as this, then it should be a good one. At the very least, it shows that Ubisoft may be done resting on its laurels, given how well-made its recent games, like Avatar and Assassin’s Creed Mirage, were.
Verdict
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a great fit for the Metroidvania genre, with excellent platforming and action that honours the past and carves out a new identity for the franchise.
The good news is that you can try out the game for yourself with a free demo going live today on all platforms. The opening hours of the game are a little slow to start and don’t give you enough tools to enjoy its combat and platforming segments well. However, you’ll get a good idea of the story and characters that might take some time to get used to, coming from the previous games.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.
This review first appeared on Men’s Journal on January 11, 2024, and was produced in partnership with GLHF. The story has been republished on The Screen Zone to preserve it as the original website is no longer active.
