	Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
	Developer: Ubisoft Publisher: Ubisoft Release Date: Out Now Players: One	Words By:
Nothing to do with the Jake Gyllenhaal movie and a sort-of sequel to the last-gen trilogy Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones, the beginning of Forgotten Sands sees the Prince riding through the desert on his horse on his way to see his elder brother Malik. Arriving at the huge palace at the heart of Malik's kingdom, he finds it under attack by an army that seeks the treasure buried deep within the palace’s dungeons. Searching out Malik who is busy fighting off the invaders the Prince finally meets up with his brother in the palace’s treasure vaults. Here Malik decides to unleash Solomon's Army—a mystical army kept in a vault by his father. Opening the vault using a magical seal Malik gets more than he bargained for as Solomon’s army are a rather unfriendly bunch of murderous skeletal sand warriors who turn Malik’s soldiers to sand and attack Malik and the prince. Narrowly escaping the collapsing vault, and after a few more escapades, the prince soon enters an otherworldly zone (that’ll be familiar to veterans of the last-gen trilogy) and meets the queen of the Marid, a “Djinn” named Razia who conjures herself up out of water. Razia is no wet drip though, and explains to the Prince that Solomon’s army wasn’t his father’s secret weapon but a force sent to destroy the kingdom, and was imprisoned using the magical seal by his father. She warns the prince that he must not let the army spread outside the palace walls and that it can only be killed with some very special skills. She empowers him with the ability to turn back time, meaning he can fall to his death or fall in battle and then save himself by rewinding time to a safe point and then doing things differently. This obviously opens up possibilities for no end of puzzles, collapsing floors and the like, and for a while you’ll be dying and then saving the prince repeatedly—you might even kill him just for fun a few times. The whole time rewind feature has been overhauled and works much better than previously, so instances where you can’t rewind to a safe spot or can’t save yourself because you can’t rewind time far enough are rare. The latest PoP has the series’ trademark fluid movement and animation and it’s never looked better, with varied stone textures, sploshy water effects and gilded decor throughout the spectacular palace. The game has a tremendous feeling of depth and space and all kinds of incidental eye candy that you’re more likely to notice when you’re watching someone else play. Some of the more panoramic sections use fixed cameras and rival God of War III’s epic visuals, and the cut-scenes not only manage to sometimes look movie-realistic, but segue seamlessly into gameplay without a hint of loading. He’s probably the original video game free-runner and in Forgotten Sands the prince uses several familiar ways of getting around. You get the usual helpings of swordplay, swinging from bars, shimmying along ledges, and rolling/jumping to avoid nasty chopping blades and heavy machinery that wants to squish you. You again hang onto broken pillars and jump from one to the other, but this has been tweaked beautifully to make it quicker and more natural, and wall-running has never been as easy to do or worked as well. The controls are—initially at least—intuitive and the prince controls accurately. As mentioned previously the game often fixes the camera in place and this can lead to some perspective problems when judging jumps, but it also means you’ll rarely be roving around cluelessly wondering where the heck you’re supposed to go next. There are several flourishes to the swordplay that make it a lot of fun. Jumping on enemies, shoving them backwards (kicking enemies that topple off of ledges to their death will never get old), close-up finishing moves and aerial slashes all flow into one glorious movement—and all without a hint of gore as your enemies are made of sand. Just by killing enemies you gain XP (Experience Points) which can be spent on unlocking new elemental powers and then upgrading them. Later on in the game Razia also gives the prince the ability to freeze water and see things from the past, these skills allow him to swing, climb or wall run on frozen water spouts or waterfalls, and see and use parts of the palace’s structure that may not actually be there anymore. Fire, ice and wind attacks bolster the prince’s not-insignificant sword fighting abilities, and stone armour (the prince takes no damage whatsoever while it lasts) and the ability to fly short distances (it’s really more of a jump boost air-dash sort of thing) cap off an amazing set of powers. Unlike the old trilogy in which the swordfights with the innumerable enemies taxed your patience beyond safe limits, in Forgotten Sands the swordplay is great fun, and the powers that you can earn and enhance mean that even when surrounded by 15 or 20 enemies you’ll always feel in control of your own destiny. The puzzles are usually of a ‘turn this lever to move/open that thing’ type but are satisfying to solve without taxing the brain. If anything, some parts play a bit too easily as the prince stays glued to narrow beams that other games would make you balance on, and he firmly refuses to run over the edge of a drop to his death and always grabs the edge to save himself, added to the fact that enemies you slay early on—who are presumably human and not supernatural—simply disappear without a drop of blood being shed and it’s almost like Ubisoft were visited by the Health & Safety Executive or something. The music comprises of a top-quality orchestral score with a Middle-Eastern flavour and adds hugely to the atmosphere. As anyone who’s been to a desert will tell you, the sand gets everywhere and the way sand flows and dust wafts around and pours from the cracked masonry as the place falls apart is extremely well done. There’s a Challenge Mode with two types of game unlocks: Enemy Tides is playable once you’ve completed the story and Time Trial unlocks via Ubisoft’s Uplay points – one is simply survival against waves of enemies and the other sets a time limit. These challenge modes can also be used to gain XP and boost the prince’s abilities for the story mode should you play it through a second time. The only downsides of this fine adventure are a couple of occasions when the frame rate inexplicably drops and a widely-reported glitch that means—should you fall in the wrong place—that you’re trapped in an area that the game thinks you’ve already completed and you have to restart the game from the beginning or go into the memory manager and delete the quick save, which loses you a couple of hours gameplay. I can’t say I experienced this glitch personally but a lot of people have suffered from it so while this may be fixable with an update, you need to be aware of it. The boss battles are spectacular but, as has become a habit in the PoP series, are yet again a huge let down. You’ll have a lot more fun getting there than actually defeating Malik/Ratash with the same old tired-out "hack & slash/avoid massive attack/kill underlings/hack & slash/rinse-repeat" approach that has been the blueprint for every unimaginative boss battle since the prince was just a boy and Persia was all just fields. To finish off the ‘moans’ section, the level designers also stretch the control setup’s capabilities and the gamer’s patience to the limit with a few sections that require literal split-second timing, not a particularly easy thing when both the triggers (water freeze and wall run), ‘LB’ (memory) and ‘A’ button (jump) are involved in a single obstacle. Forgotten Sands is a fabulous-looking game that plays as good as it looks, a few tricky sections will test your patience and it’s not overlong, with only a few unlikely achievements and hidden sarcophagi to make you go back and play it again.

Best Bits
- Eye candy throughout – PoP:TFS is a real stunner.
- Some brilliant platform sections, puzzles and ancient mechanisms.
- Even better swordplay than Assassin’s Creed 2
- No Jake Gyllenhaal

Worst Bits
- Occasionally the fixed camera views are unhelpful and cause perspective problems.
- Unimaginative boss battles


by: Diddly