This is a great game. It's as fine as Metroidvania games can be for the most part. Combat is fun, movement is fast and responsive, and it's a great return for the Prince of Persia series, which made me want to play the older games.

The main issue I have with this game is traversal. The game takes too long to give you an actually useful fast-travel option. You have an option from the beginning, but the travel points are spread in a weird way. Sometimes you'll have two fast travels really close to each other, and then other times you'll have whole areas with just one fast travel, which is super weird.

While backtracking is a core element of Metroidvanias, I feel like it's not really fun here. As the fast travel points are spread in such a weird way, sometimes you are walking between long areas you've been to a thousand times and doing platform challenges you already went through, just to get to a chest that will give you a little bit of money. This is fixed by the end of the game when you unlock fast travels between Tree checkpoints(the "bonfire" of this game), but until then, it feels like the game doesn't really want you to explore.

I love a lot of the ideas this game brings to the table, the map screenshots, for example, are great, and I wish every Metroidvania game adds this from now on.

Boss fights are also insanely fun, probably the best part of the game. Some are way too hard, but you can try out different talisman combinations, or even change the difficulty of the game on the fly with the difficulty customization options(which are a great addition to any game, and very welcome).

Play this game and let Ubisoft know that they should do more stuff like this. It's a breath of fresh air in a sea of huge open-world games filled with mindless tasks.

A really great revival of the Prince of Persia series and generally one of the most fun Metroidvanias I've ever played. The presentation here is gorgeous with some anime inspired influences, really striking character designs and a dynamic range of gorgeous environments. It still has that classic PoP energy with the classic traversing around obstacles, Persian locales and swashbuckling combat. Speaking of which, it feels so great here and really allows for some dynamic combat encounters. Bosses whilst they have some really overpowered moves that takes a lot of trial and error to learn how to avoid, are actually really fun to fight and learning to make use of Sargon's entire kit to overpower them is super satisfying. The abilities you unlock besides the dimension shifting ability (which is good in specific sections designed around it) and item grab really transform how you enjoy combat and traversal and is used really cleverly as you get further in the game, the sense of progression here is pretty great and keeps you hooked. The story wasn't perfect and does get inconsistent with character pacing for the other Immortals but overall they're played well by the cast and really stand out in their boss fights.

While the platforming is really great and the major areas are filled with a lot of unique locations within them, the maps did feel a little bloated at times leading to a lot of backtracking with some areas having a lot of unnecessary place. While I enjoyed collecting amulets and athra surges, some of them felt pointless to collect with a lot of upgrades just feeling more pointless than the core set I chose at a certain point.

I played this on Switch, and while it mostly ran at 60FPS there is times where I did have some slowdown, freezes and long loading times. I overall had a good experience with this game but those are worth pointing out.

Such a fresh Prince of Persia experience!

For a series that, in retrospect, is no stranger to genre and gameplay changes, it's great that the next step is one of the most popular genres of the era.

And it's not a case of taking a genre and making a stereotypical game. Both the series and the genre have been well-studied and one of the nice surprises of the year has been made.