This game is a strange piece that I’m surprised came to be, a metroidvania in a series that I’ve never personally played or been interested in, and that I don’t think they’ve ever tackled. Now I’m just confused on what the Prince of Persia series even IS. This game gets quite a bit right, with a heavy amount of flaws. It’s a decently solid metroidvania with some cool innovations, and while it feels like they didn’t quite have the intricate knowledge to make the groundbreaking game they wanted to, they still met in the middle and made a pretty good game.

If they nailed anything in this game, it’s Sargon’s movement. A metroidvania is always split into combat, exploration, and platforming, and forgetting the last one can lead to the mix being unbalanced. Thankfully, this game almost succeeds as a Platformer more than any other category. Sargon is smooth as butter, feels great to control, has some incredibly fun abilities later in the game, such as the staple air dash, or the GRAPPLING HOOK (This is the best ability in the game and it’s a crime it’s the last you unlock). Some abilities felt more like keys than upgrades, like the flipping blocks power or the grabbing explosions power, but they’re made up for with some solid entries in Sargon’s arsenal.

While decently expansive and fun to explore, the design of Mount Qaf feels a bit… sloppy? I’m not sure how to describe it, but it doesn’t feel as intricate or natural as something like Hollownest in Hollow Knight or Planet Zebes in Metroid. It feels like the work of a team that was less familiar with the style of game, but honestly, it’s in no means bad. Just feels like there’s a lot of room for improvement. The combat in this game almost feels like they’re trying to do a 2D Devil May Cry, and it’s kinda fun to combo enemies until they start getting super armor and unpushable on every single enemy late game. It doesn’t help that the dodge doesn’t have invincibility frames (or if it does, I couldn’t tell), because the risk and reward system that makes that kind of combat fun became more like a risk and then run away for a bit system. Abilities like the block toggle or the shadow teleport are practically useless in battle, and a lot of the scaling in terms of difficulty, health, and damage are kinda all over the place for a large portion of the game. I started mostly avoiding combat later on, which is never a good sign. A lot of the boss fights are really fun though! While I think the game has a HUGE problem with enemies telegraphing attacks, something exasperated in bosses, the bosses themselves are super fun to go to town on and cross swords with, and have the level of spectacle and over-the-top craziness that I love.

The story is serviceable, I certainly didn’t expect it to get to the scale and universal level it did, but I always appreciate my spectacle, so I welcomed it. What I didn’t welcome was every character falling somewhat flat and one-note, however. Anihita was a boring, nothing character, Vahram only started getting interesting when his backstory was revealed, Sargon is kinda just a protagonist and nothing more, and the rest of the immortals peanuts gallery are similarly uninteresting. It’s a shame because I found the story to actually be pretty good, I was interested in what was happening and found the developments fun. But I didn’t care about any of the characters the story was happening TO. It’s a shame, because it’s definitely a result of mixing a metroidvania gameplay style with a more AAA-style form of presentation, which doesn’t mix terribly well.

Another example of the AAA-ification of the metroidvania genre is the worldbuilding/lore. In metroidvanias, the reason people are interested in lore and environmental storytelling is usually because of a lack of information, not an abundance. People like to put mysteries together, it’s the reason Hollow Knight theory crafting and the like are so popular. I keep bringing up these other examples because it feels like this game took heavy inspiration from these incredible titles, but slightly missed the mark on why they work so well. When I see vague hieroglyphics in Metroid Zero Mission, I get interested in that tribe and their history. But in Prince of Persia, when I get a document called ‘The Fall of the Hyrcanian Tribe’ that’s seven paragraphs long, I immediately glaze over and go “oh I guess there was a Hyrcanian Tribe and they fell.” By overwhelming the player with information, I find that I actually lose interest in the information being given. Gaming should not be a boring history class.

I heard that this game was built for the switch and then optimized and upscaled for more modern platforms, and I don’t know how true that is, because this game is buggy as hell! One of the most buggy games I’ve played in recent memory! I’m just gonna go through a list of bugs that I encountered in my casual playthrough.
- Cutscene stuttering and Audio desync CONSTANTLY
- Sometimes when enemies spawned in their models would flicker a bright white.
- At some point I got the notification icon for a new item over the character and lore sections in my menu, and then they never went away, even after interacting with those items.
- Never in a metroidvania should I be able to jump over a wall and clip out of bounds. Expect that the player will break your movement system over their knee.
- During the FINAL BOSS OF THE GAME, Sargon became invisible and invulnerable, allowing me to beat this cool but kinda unfair boss
- One time, after fast-traveling, only half of the world loaded in, there was no UI, Sargon didn’t end any of his animations and had no collision with the world, and I had to restart the game. Quitting to the main menu and reloading didn’t work, I had to close and reopen it.
This game needed another couple months, maybe another year in the oven. I’m not sure if this is an Ubisoft ‘thing’ or not but from what I’ve played their games are usually more stable than this. None of this hindered my enjoyment at all, it’s just something important to mention if that does bother others.

Overall, kind of a fascinating game that feels like a triple AAA studio tried to make a metroidvania and only kinda succeeded? I definitely enjoyed my time and was satisfied. I had a whole lot of critiques and complaints, but for what it’s worth, this is a fun time. It’s like a burger with just onions and ketchup. I wouldn’t have ordered that, but yknow what, it ain’t bad.

Depending on your perspective, this is either a puzzle game where it’s actively tedious and frustrating to implement a solution, or a Platformer where Mario feels like dogwater to play and dies in one hit.

This game is fine, if underwhelming for the most part until you hit the last couple worlds (normal worlds, I didn’t even bother with the extra content), where the game just becomes a bullshit fest with projectiles everywhere. The thing about the difficulty in this game is that it’s not really hard. The problem is that Mario dies in a SINGLE HIT. And in a PUZZLE GAME, having the punishment of a minor mistake like a misinput or mistimed jumped being having to REDO THE LEVEL, you can see why this game’s indecision on whether it’s a Platformer or a puzzle game becomes a huge problem.

Donkey Kong’s boss fights are the opposite of fun. If you want the star, you have to take no damage, which means you hit him three times no problem, and on his last life he throws ten thousand projectiles that you can’t react to because Mario controls like a four-wheeler in the arctic, and you die repeatedly. It’s annoying when the hardest part of a fight is at the end, because then you have to go through the monotony of the rest of the boss fight again to even try to fix your mistake.

This game ranges from being mind-numbingly boring to being actively frustrating, and I didn’t have much fun playing it after the first couple worlds. It is at least a cute time for a little while, pick it up for an hour and drop it. Stop the second you hit the ice world.

But seriously, $50 for this shit?? A remake of a subpar GBA game with some bonus content? Embarrassing.