Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

This is actually my second journey through a Prince of Persia title on the Xbox 360. I completed the original release of the game before my reviews started and if my retrospective Assassin’s Creed reviews are anything to go by, it’s probably not worth revisiting. To be honest, I’m not even sure The Forgotten Sands will get a worthwhile review. I was recently sick and kept in bed for a few days and one of those days was used to complete this game in its entirety.

The Forgotten Sands was released at a similar time to the movie tie-in (which is named after the original Xbox release, Sands of Time, also known as ‘The Good One’) starring Jake Gylenhaal, so it’s no surprise that the Persian Prince you play as looks eerily similar to the guy in the movie posters.

The game itself follows the story of two brothers. There is ‘Brother who Doesn’t Listen’ and ‘Brother you Play as’. As with any Prince of Persia game, Sand is evil and ‘Brother who Doesn’t Listen’ releases evil sand to try and defend the kingdom. Naturally this backfires and evil sand kills everyone and turns ‘Brother who Doesn’t Listen’ power mad. It’s then up to ‘Brother you Play as’ to save the day. With hilarious consequences. But not really.

The story arch is basically ripped and taken from any other game in history where there are bad guys and good guys and to be honest it looks very tired. On the subject of looking tired the graphics use the standard grey/faded yellow filter which is also old and unoriginal but then again, I suppose it is a sand themed game. The same can also be said for the music. It uses what I swear is the same score from the previous game, maybe with a slight unnoticeable twist.

The gameplay is very questionable, especially when it comes to the controls. Generally speaking, Prince of Persia games have two main things you have to do. Number 1; climb stuff. Number 2; kill stuff. I have no problem with the kill stuff mechanics which worked fine but the climb stuff mechanics can fuck right off.

In order to traverse the environment, you have the ability to rewind time if you fuck up. If you have never played any other platformer, including previous Prince of Persia games, you will most likely be fine. However if you have played any other platformers, the controls in Forgotten Sands will make no sense. There is no jump button so you have to wall run up and across walls using the right trigger and, my memory is a little foggy, but I’m pretty sure the directional controls don’t actually do anything when you are free running and despite playing the game for several hours in row, I could not disengage my brain from the using the A button to try and jump in a given direction. This led to many deaths and in certain places, game over because I ran out of rewind power. I’m all for being original but don’t fuck with basic platforming principles. The controls appear to be different for the sake it, not because it makes sense.

Achievements - 1,000 Points – 40 Achievements

As I said, I finished this one in a day so there was no major challenges on offer, however there were some fiddly bits. The main issue with the game and its achievements is that there are no reloadable checkpoints and there are missable achievements because of this. Basically if you dive in and just go through the story then you will have to do multiple playthroughs. The joys of being ill was that I had time to read up on what I had to do before I started playing.

There are three bits which are missable. One is for collecting all of the sarcophagai scattered throughout the game. Some of these were quite hard to find and I had to use my rewind time ability a lot due to the shitty controls I mentioned earlier. The other two are for getting through both boss sections without taking damage. The one at the end of the game isn’t so much of an issue because you can reload this over and over again and continually finish the game, however the one in the middle I was glad to know about because I had to reload five or six times or purpose before I got the jumping pattern right. That’s right, this one is based on knowing what’s going to happen before it happens so it’s basically trial and error rather than skill which makes the whole not having reloadable checkpoints thing ridiculous.

Now, there is an argument that I perhaps shouldn’t have looked these things up before I started playing but the game is so sinfully boring that I couldn’t have faced another playthrough so I’m glad I did.

Aside from the missable achievements, there are quite a few for killing enemies in a lot of different ways. All of these can be obtained easily enough in the Enemy Tides Challenge with perhaps the exception of killing 50 enemies in a row without taking damage and definitely the exception of killing 20 enemies by kicking them off ledges. Again, these are two things you will need to know about before starting the game to avoid a second playthrough. The 50 enemies without taking damage can apparently be spammed at a point in the game where loads of bugs come flying out of the ground. I didn’t know about this though so actually killed 50 sand skeletons the hard way.

After completing the main story, the only thing I had left to do was complete the Enemy Tides challenge and get all my abilities. The Enemy Tides challenge is easy enough. You just have to fight through waves of enemies. The game records your best time for doing so.

After doing all of the above, I was annoyingly really far away from getting all the abilities. I had to rerun the Enemy Tides challenge 5 or 6 times to grind out the rest of the experience for the abilities I needed to buy. Judging by my excitement from the Saint’s Row the Third review about having a time balance with the achievements you can probably tell that this didn’t endear me towards the game.

And that was me done. Or so I thought. I had one secret achievement left that I didn’t know about. Like I said at the beginning I wasn’t one for multiple playthoughs but I was a little confused because the game had a difficulty level and there was no achievement for completing it on hard so I just went for it on easy to make my life... easier. In hindsight this was a mistake because the last achievement is for starting the game on normal but lowering it to easy once you have died. Incidentally, this was the one thing I didn’t look up before I started!

Downloadable Content – N/A

This game was a resounding ‘meh’ for me. I was glad to get it done it a day because any further play time would have been depressing. There is one more title in the Prince of Persia collection for playing the classic arcade version but I don’t think I’ll be touching that one for a while.