A Revolutionary Platformer Game – Prince of Persia The Lost Crown Review
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is the newest entry in the Prince of Persia series. Unlike the other Prince of Persia games, this title is a Metroidvania game (a 2D side-scroller and platformer where the focus is on exploration to obtain new abilities and then using those newly acquired abilities to revisit previously unreachable locations in an extremely interconnected world, sometimes in a non-linear way.)
The story in this game is self-contained and you don’t need to play other games to understand its story. This is a good thing, seeing as the Prince of Persia series has been rebooted many times over several decades. A lot of people mistakenly believe that 2008’s Prince of Persia was the original game, and I’d often have to tell them that the original was a DOS game that came out all the way back in 1990. The series has come a long way since then with many quality of life improvements.
I’ll only provide a synopsis of the first hour of plot in the game to prevent spoilers. You play as Sargon, a young warrior in a group of seven called the Immortals, the Queen’s strongest soldiers. The tutorial level consists of Sargon defeating invading forces as well as one of the enemy generals. For his achievements in the battle, Sargon is given an award and celebrates with the Immortals.
The group of seven Immortals is extremely well fleshed out. Each character in the Immortals has their own appearance and personality that you learn more about in snippets as you progress through the game. Looking back, not all of the Immortals have quite enough screen-time (some get more scenes than others), but most do have a lot of lines of dialog, and they each bring a lot of individuality to the group. They’re essentially the main cast of game.
Returning to the plot, at the celebration the prince is kidnapped, and its up to the Immortals to find him in Mount Qaf, a very labyrinthine and cursed mountain. The premise of the game is very interesting. Having a good story might not necessarily be a priority for those looking to play a Metroidvania game, but it is a nice bonus to have. If you’re not interested in story, the majority of the story scenes takes place only in the very beginning and ending of the game, and perhaps a big twist or two during the middle of the game too. Otherwise, all other cutscenes are shown as NPC interactions in very short bursts throughout the game.
The cutscenes are never intrusive and it’s all about the gameplay throughout most of the game. I played with the English dub and the voice acting was extremely well done, with all NPC lines in the game being voiced as well. The cutscenes are shown both in 2D animations as well as some 3D cutscenes as well.
Most of the cutscenes have 2D drawn portraits speaking on the screen and are drawn extremely well. It’s not a realistic looking game at all and I really enjoyed the comic book (cartoony) look many of the characters had.
In fact, many boss fights had unique animations that would play out if you parried a boss’s unique attack which was a great attention to detail. Sometimes you’d also get unique animations if bosses used special attacks on Sargon as well. A lot of these special animations reminded me of Street Fighter 6’s Super Moves and look very flashy. Never before have I been happy to die to a super move!
Although the game is played on a 2D plane, the 3D backgrounds look amazing, from sprawling desert landscapes, dark and dreary catacombs, pirate ships, to even royal palace interiors.
The mix between real and fantasy is done well too with the character designs and combat animations. The parkour animations look really smooth and never feels janky. I’d go as far as to say Ubisoft has mastered the art of making a platformer. It makes the game very enjoyable to play, but the game still does have authenticity with its Persia setting. I won’t spoil the bosses, but there are many interesting mythical creatures you fight.
At the same time, the series does stay very true to its roots, namely focusing on fun platforming challenges, though the combat is vastly improved in this title compared to older Prince of Persia games. The combat is similar to Metroid Dread, but not in a bad way and not in a copying way either. It’s more like the developers may have gotten inspiration from Metroid Dread and wanted to make a fun Metroidvania game too.
This game still has its own personality, and there’s more of a focus on physical attacks in this title compared to Metroid which has more shooting. Sargon can dodge, parry, and attack using his sword, bow or chakram (circular throwing weapon). Enemies and bosses telegraph their attacks, and often glow yellow to indicate if it’s a parry-able attack, or red if it can’t be parried. Later bosses become really fast at attacking you and are some of the best boss fights I’ve seen in a game.
The combat feels extremely fluid and is addicting. I can imagine others making the claim that the bosses are similar to those in Souls-like games, and it can be true to an extent. The bosses are never overly hard though unless you purposely play on the hardest difficulty. The game is extremely approachable for newcomers, offering many difficulty levels. The boss fights are extremely fair and their attacks can be learned over time.
The platforming is extremely fun as well. If you die on spikes or fall down a pit, then you’ll only lose a small amount of health and you’ll generally respawn at the last normal platform you were standing on. Some of the platforming challenges are very tricky and I managed to die over a dozen times, but they’re very fair and respawning after dying on spikes is very fast, allowing you to hop back onto the saddle quickly. This game had the same developers as Rayman: Origins and Rayman: Legends and it really shows. It’s an extremely fun platformer and although some puzzles stumped me at times it always felt fair and I was never sick of it.
There are Wak-Wak Trees that you can save at that you respawn at when you die. Following modern game design there’s never any game over, you can just respawn at keep trying, and collectibles that you found will remain collected too. Only enemies respawn after a death. As a result, dying is never frustrating.
These trees can be used to heal, but if you heal at them then enemies respawn. Similar to Elden Ring, you’ll see a glow when you’re close by to one and it points the general direction it’s in.
There are many regions in this game with distinct biomes that suit the setting of Persia well, from catacombs, old libraries, royal palaces, and more. In addition to normal difficulty levels, this game also has an option for Exploration mode or Guided mode. Guided mode will have objective marked on your map for the main story. Even if you choose to show objectives, it doesn’t spoil the locations of sidequests and it only shows the end-goal you need to reach for the next story objective. It keeps you on track without sacrificing the joy coming from making discoveries. You can also buy maps from an NPC, but it only shows the room layouts without the locations of collectibles. To put it simply, the map in The Lost Crown is one of the largest out of any Metroidvania game and the levels are very interconnected, with 2-3 exits in each regions leading to other regions.
There are many kinds of collectibles in the game – some for upgrades, some for currency, and some containing lore regarding the characters, bosses, and setting. There’s sidequests with unique NPCs that also provide rewards, they’ll give hints where to go though some can be tricky to find and complete.
It’s great that each sidequest is a unique little substory and they never feel generic at all. There’s even hidden walls, so if a wall looks suspicious such as a corridor leading to a dead end, you can try hitting it and sometimes you’ll find out the wall is fake and leads to another explorable area. All hidden walls are optional though and never required for story progression (I’m looking at you, Strange Journey). Or you can use your bird’s chirping to help you find collectibles, though its chirping can get annoying after a while.
The game, thankfully, eases you into its enormous world. The areas you’re in start off small, but being to sprawl with numerous paths after a few hours. It’s the same with the enemies too – they start off easy with very generous timings to dodge and parry, but the enemies get much harder later on (never in a repetitive way though). As you progress, you unlock more abilities including the mainstays of any Metroidvania game, such as unlocking double jumping, dashing, saving your location and teleporting back to it, using your chakram to turn gears, and much more.
There are puzzles to obtain old coins named Xerxes and these often feature fun platforming puzzles where you need to grab the coin and get out safely to keep it.
The puzzles never had me scratching my head. I just had to use the abilities I had with some slick platforming. Some of the platforming moves I had to do were a little tricky, but the game really didn’t punish you for failing and you could immediately try again, similar to Rayman: Origin and Rayman: Legends.
This game has the same Metroidvania game design philosophy we see in many modern games, where the game makes you use the new ability you acquired to progress, ensuring you know how to use your new ability. This is a really brilliant way of doing a tutorial naturally.
At the same time, the game will also tell you with a red locked icon if you require a certain ability to progress for story progressed locked areas, so you won’t spend hours trying to get somewhere you shouldn’t be, and when you unlock the required ability it’ll show it unlocked in green on the map.
Like any other Metroidvania, once you unlock most of the abilities in the game you can get through previous platforming puzzles much more easily. For instance, double jump makes all the puzzles where you only had single jump trivial. There are multiple teleporters located in each region, but if you still wanted to backtrack for a quest or collectible you forgot and a teleporter wasn’t close by, you could generally do it much faster than your original attempt.
One really amazing idea from the developers is that you unlock the ability to capture an image of the screen and view them on your map at any time (Memory Shards). This is probably one of the best quality of life improvements I’ve seen in a Metroidvania game, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been done earlier! When you think about it, it doesn’t take much computational effort – a screenshot is just a small image that doesn’t take up much space and modern consoles have many games on the market that allow you to take screenshots no problem nowadays.
I used to play older Metroidvania games with two monitors, using one to play the game with a console, and another connected to a PC to take screenshots, store them, and possibly make my own version of the map if the game I’m playing doesn’t have a good in-game map interface. But The Lost Crown saves me from doing all the work since I can just take a screenshot and view where it was taken on the map. In these kinds of games you often have to backtrack in order to get upgrades, but sometimes each area has something different that’s blocking your progression. Now you can see clearly what kind of barriers are in what locations.
My only criticism is that the number of screenshots you can take is limited and you need to find upgrades for Memory Shards itself in the game to improve it. I wish that they gave you almost unlimited uses of this, and I don’t see the point in making it upgradeable. It’s not the same as, say, upgrading your weapons which should certainly require upgrades since improving your damage output might break the game and should be halted by game progression.
Having unlimited screenshots wouldn’t make you overpowered, it would only allow you to keep track of where all the areas you want to return to are. It’s not like using Memory Shards lets you bypass the obstacles, you’ll still need to backtrack either way. On the bright side, if you remove the screenshot you get the Memory Shard back so it’s not like it’s an unfair system.
The combat feels very fluid as well. You can upgrade your weapon and bow as well and use amulets you can find or buy to gain access to passives to suit your playstyle. Some collectibles will even upgrade your amulet to let you equip more at once. Even if you don’t go out of your way to explore, the game still gives you a fair amount of health upgrades from mandatory boss fights. If you seek out all the endgame upgrades, you can become very overpowered as with the case in any Metroidvania game.
I really enjoyed The Lost Crown and felt that it was a refreshing experience. I have been critical of Ubisoft’s recent AAA titles in the past. I felt that many of them were very bloated, with so much content that I’d often feel overwhelmed, like a deer seeing headlights. Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla was able 60+ hours just for the main story before even accounting for any side content, and although open worlds look phenomenal it often felt monotonous to go to all the fast travel towers, capturing all the bases, etc. Which would often be required since if you don’t upgrade your characters, you might hit a wall in the story.
It was nice playing Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown because it plays like an indie game, and it took me 20 hours to complete doing most of the side content and backtracking to go for collectibles. With skill, you don’t even need to get collectibles and you can even beat the game only doing the story if you really wanted to. I believe your playtime may be reduced if you’re more skilled at Metroidvania games as I did spend a few hours failing the trickier platforming sections and re-fighting the bosses until I could win.
The level design feels very tight and polished, while at the same time having a huge map for a Metroidvania game that is extremely interconnected with well-placed healing tree and teleporter stations. The character designs, animations, graphics and soundtrack are all top-notch as well.
I’ll say, without spoiling, that the story does have its flaws at parts with pacing issues, but it’s still a very enjoyable story especially for a Metroidvania game which typically don’t have good narratives. My favorite part about this game is the gameplay – both the platforming and the combat itself (especially boss fights) are really well done. The ability to take in-game screenshots and view them on your map is an amazing feature that all Metroidvania games moving forward need to have. This is my favorite modern Metroidvania game alongside Metroid: Dread, another phenomenal game that blew everyone away. This game doesn’t feel bloated or grindy at all, it just feels very fun to play. Although I died numerous times in both platforming challenges and endgame boss fights, I kept on playing due to the fun I was having.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Our Score: Amazing
Pros
- The platforming is very fun and addicting. This game comes from the same developers as Rayman: Origin and the levels play similarly, with challenging platforming but you can keep retrying them.
- Combat is extremely fluid and there are phenomenal boss fights towards the endgame.
- The world is large and very interconnected. The mapping interface is well-made, and you can take screenshots in-game to view within the map, a feature I’ve never seen before in a Metroidvania game.
- The story starts out strong, but does have pacing issues and is weak at points.
- This game is a Metroidvania first and foremost, so there is a difficulty curve if you’re a newcomer to these kinds of games.
- Some boss fights can be difficulty spikes, and you do have to do due diligence in finding collectibles and upgrades for Sargon.
– Brandon Harris
Reviewed on the PC
Recent Posts
