Actually worthy of the hype! Even though there are some typical Ubisoft annoyances, which they're always good at including, I found myself really enjoying this one and having a hard time giving up playing it until I was completely done. Lost Crown is an aesthetically pretty game with a main protagonist that's enjoyable to control and some really cool audiovisual experiences.
The first and most striking thing is the visuals, and I constantly enjoyed seeing the absolutely massive city sprawling in the background, or a crumbling statue frozen in time. I really enjoyed both the navigation and visuals of most areas, my favorite being the "Raging Sea" area, which is so cool that I feel like maybe I shouldn't spoil the discovery, but I'm going to anyway. It's a fierce storm at sea that's been frozen in time, so ships splintering, crew flying off deck, masts breaking in half, all eerily still as you run through. In fact, time is so stopped that you run on the surface of the water. It looks and feels so cool! (Now, the goal of the area is to unfreeze time, which is a huge bummer, but thankfully, they didn't bother animating the first part of the level once time is unfrozen so even though it makes no sense with the story, the first half of Raging Sea remains stuck in time so you can go back and enjoy it while grabbing collectibles.)
Your character, who is not the prince but just some guy named Sargon, is also a joy to control and the movement abilities you obtain are just plain classic metroidvania fun. The first one you get is an air dash, which for me came in with the perfect timing just as I was saying to myself that this game sorely needs an air dash. The game also rather tastefully withholds the double jump until nearly the end, which can be a risky gamble in this genre, but I felt like it really worked out and that it also came at the perfect time, just when I had started to feel that there were a few too many rooms or situations where I'd need some kind of vertical assistance.
The game also offers an ability I don't think I've ever seen before in the genre, which is the shadow ability that allows you to drop a copy of yourself at your current location and teleport back to it instantly. The game successfully uses this in exploration, puzzles and combat, and I found myself confused often, only to remember that I can do the copy teleport thing and then the room went from seeming impossible to seeming very natural and logical. You also get an ability that reminds me of Ashen's teleport arrow, in that you can throw Sargon's chakram and teleport to where it is.
Lost Crown also offers an easily understood and readable map with just enough guidance to be helpful, but not so much that it becomes a Ubisoft marker fest. You can buy maps for treasures you haven't found, but the game waits to offer them until you've explored enough of the area by yourself (I'm not sure what the exact requirement is). If you love markers, the game does offer a baby mode that shows you everything on the map, but I never turned that on and can't comment on it. I also appreciated the game's extremely helpful screenshot mechanic, where you can take a quick screenshot that gets a marker on your map, so you can keep reminders of which corridor needed an air dash and which needed something else, or if there's a puzzle you can't quite figure out. It's basically like writing things down yourself except as an in-game feature. It's especially helpful for my scattered ADHD brain, so I enjoyed that feature a lot.
Speaking of the map and exploration, I really enjoyed how much of this game requires some serious acrobatics. While there are perhaps a few too many large and uninteresting rooms that get boring when you have to pass through them to find a health upgrade or some such, there are enough cool rooms that make up for it, and the good rooms often offer some seriously challenging, but not maddeningly difficult, platforming and acrobatics sections. The game really lives up to the parkour part of the Prince franchise and does not disappoint, to the point where I've seen people complain that there's too much of it. Personally, I don't think there is such a thing as "too much" backflipping, climbing and wall running in a Prince game. That's what the franchise has always been, since the very beginning in 1989!
So what didn't I like and why isn't it getting a perfect score? The small thing, to start with, is that I didn't really like how the plot unfolded and I didn't love the character designs or the in-game models. Especially Sargon's mentor looks and moves like a model from a PS2 game. I won't spoil what it is, but something in the ending also felt like a major plothole and oversight, that made the story make less sense than it could have. Also, the whole sewer region can go to hell and whoever designed that should not be allowed to work in misison design. They can go do some other task on a game and they shouldn't be fired, but they shouldn't be designing areas and missions. The Depths is just a pain-in-the-ass area where everything poisons you, enemies have annoying movement patterns and, worst of all, there's a long section where they take your map away and not only do they do that, the game has to taunt you about it by having the thief show up in every room, giggling at the fact that you don't get to use a map.
Those are the minor complaints, though, and the major complaints are with the combat, which I could just never truly get along with. I found the game easy enough and I managed to beat every boss on the second try, after spending the first try studying their patterns and feeeling like I was never going to beat that boss (especially Menolias), but I never truly enjoyed the combat for two reasons; the dodge kick and the conditional cancelling. The dodge kick is when you sprint or dodge (which is the same button), Sargon does an acrobatic little kick if you attack or attack cancel during the dodge, instead of tearing into his 3-hit combo. This made it needlessly painful for me to dodge and strike quickly as Sargon would always do the stupid kick instead of regular sword attacks and the kick isn't buffed by my sword amulets. I really wish the dodge kick wasn't in the game at all.
As for conditional cancelling, I mean the fact that you can dodge cancel out of your attack if your opponent readies a fast attack, but only during the first two of the three combo hits. If Sargon initiates the animation for the third attack, you can no longer cancel and have to see the attack through. I don't think this works at all and could never learn to master it. I believe that if your game offers cancelling, it's either all or nothing. Either it always works or it never does. Having it kinda sometimes work and sometimes not is just confusing and frustrating to me.
Oh, and speaking of amulets, this game's wholesale borrowing of Hollow Knight's charm system really doesn't amount to very much. There's a variety of amulets and I guess you could possibly create buidls if you really wanted to, but the game offers no reason to and you're obviously just meant to use the ones that buff melee and special attacks, because everything else is so clearly inferior.
The final complaint is that there were quite a few moments where I really had no clue where to go, like for example when the hint girl tells you that you should check out either the pirate zone or the forest zone, but really, you're supposed to go straight to the forest because the pirate place requires an ability you get from the forest path. I wasted an embarassing amount of time trying to figure the pirate area out because of this, and this sort of confusion happens a couple of times throughout the game's near 25-hour runtime. In the end, though, this one didn't bother me that much because there's always the internet if you're truly stuck and can't figure something out. The difficulty spike bosses didn't bother me either, because every time that happened, I could overcome rthe issue by backtracking and finding a few more health upgrades and that allowed me to defeat the previously seemingly unbeatable boss and that's just how this genre should work.
In short, a very good game, the rare Ubisoft surprise from the studio that almost always delivers their most surprisingly good games (so maybe it shouldn't be that surprising), with a few flaws that hold it back from being a masterpiece. Even with the mistakes and flaws, this is still far better than you might expect from the company and anyone who likes Prince games or metroidvanias should play this if they haven't already.
The first and most striking thing is the visuals, and I constantly enjoyed seeing the absolutely massive city sprawling in the background, or a crumbling statue frozen in time. I really enjoyed both the navigation and visuals of most areas, my favorite being the "Raging Sea" area, which is so cool that I feel like maybe I shouldn't spoil the discovery, but I'm going to anyway. It's a fierce storm at sea that's been frozen in time, so ships splintering, crew flying off deck, masts breaking in half, all eerily still as you run through. In fact, time is so stopped that you run on the surface of the water. It looks and feels so cool! (Now, the goal of the area is to unfreeze time, which is a huge bummer, but thankfully, they didn't bother animating the first part of the level once time is unfrozen so even though it makes no sense with the story, the first half of Raging Sea remains stuck in time so you can go back and enjoy it while grabbing collectibles.)
Your character, who is not the prince but just some guy named Sargon, is also a joy to control and the movement abilities you obtain are just plain classic metroidvania fun. The first one you get is an air dash, which for me came in with the perfect timing just as I was saying to myself that this game sorely needs an air dash. The game also rather tastefully withholds the double jump until nearly the end, which can be a risky gamble in this genre, but I felt like it really worked out and that it also came at the perfect time, just when I had started to feel that there were a few too many rooms or situations where I'd need some kind of vertical assistance.
The game also offers an ability I don't think I've ever seen before in the genre, which is the shadow ability that allows you to drop a copy of yourself at your current location and teleport back to it instantly. The game successfully uses this in exploration, puzzles and combat, and I found myself confused often, only to remember that I can do the copy teleport thing and then the room went from seeming impossible to seeming very natural and logical. You also get an ability that reminds me of Ashen's teleport arrow, in that you can throw Sargon's chakram and teleport to where it is.
Lost Crown also offers an easily understood and readable map with just enough guidance to be helpful, but not so much that it becomes a Ubisoft marker fest. You can buy maps for treasures you haven't found, but the game waits to offer them until you've explored enough of the area by yourself (I'm not sure what the exact requirement is). If you love markers, the game does offer a baby mode that shows you everything on the map, but I never turned that on and can't comment on it. I also appreciated the game's extremely helpful screenshot mechanic, where you can take a quick screenshot that gets a marker on your map, so you can keep reminders of which corridor needed an air dash and which needed something else, or if there's a puzzle you can't quite figure out. It's basically like writing things down yourself except as an in-game feature. It's especially helpful for my scattered ADHD brain, so I enjoyed that feature a lot.
Speaking of the map and exploration, I really enjoyed how much of this game requires some serious acrobatics. While there are perhaps a few too many large and uninteresting rooms that get boring when you have to pass through them to find a health upgrade or some such, there are enough cool rooms that make up for it, and the good rooms often offer some seriously challenging, but not maddeningly difficult, platforming and acrobatics sections. The game really lives up to the parkour part of the Prince franchise and does not disappoint, to the point where I've seen people complain that there's too much of it. Personally, I don't think there is such a thing as "too much" backflipping, climbing and wall running in a Prince game. That's what the franchise has always been, since the very beginning in 1989!
So what didn't I like and why isn't it getting a perfect score? The small thing, to start with, is that I didn't really like how the plot unfolded and I didn't love the character designs or the in-game models. Especially Sargon's mentor looks and moves like a model from a PS2 game. I won't spoil what it is, but something in the ending also felt like a major plothole and oversight, that made the story make less sense than it could have. Also, the whole sewer region can go to hell and whoever designed that should not be allowed to work in misison design. They can go do some other task on a game and they shouldn't be fired, but they shouldn't be designing areas and missions. The Depths is just a pain-in-the-ass area where everything poisons you, enemies have annoying movement patterns and, worst of all, there's a long section where they take your map away and not only do they do that, the game has to taunt you about it by having the thief show up in every room, giggling at the fact that you don't get to use a map.
Those are the minor complaints, though, and the major complaints are with the combat, which I could just never truly get along with. I found the game easy enough and I managed to beat every boss on the second try, after spending the first try studying their patterns and feeeling like I was never going to beat that boss (especially Menolias), but I never truly enjoyed the combat for two reasons; the dodge kick and the conditional cancelling. The dodge kick is when you sprint or dodge (which is the same button), Sargon does an acrobatic little kick if you attack or attack cancel during the dodge, instead of tearing into his 3-hit combo. This made it needlessly painful for me to dodge and strike quickly as Sargon would always do the stupid kick instead of regular sword attacks and the kick isn't buffed by my sword amulets. I really wish the dodge kick wasn't in the game at all.
As for conditional cancelling, I mean the fact that you can dodge cancel out of your attack if your opponent readies a fast attack, but only during the first two of the three combo hits. If Sargon initiates the animation for the third attack, you can no longer cancel and have to see the attack through. I don't think this works at all and could never learn to master it. I believe that if your game offers cancelling, it's either all or nothing. Either it always works or it never does. Having it kinda sometimes work and sometimes not is just confusing and frustrating to me.
Oh, and speaking of amulets, this game's wholesale borrowing of Hollow Knight's charm system really doesn't amount to very much. There's a variety of amulets and I guess you could possibly create buidls if you really wanted to, but the game offers no reason to and you're obviously just meant to use the ones that buff melee and special attacks, because everything else is so clearly inferior.
The final complaint is that there were quite a few moments where I really had no clue where to go, like for example when the hint girl tells you that you should check out either the pirate zone or the forest zone, but really, you're supposed to go straight to the forest because the pirate place requires an ability you get from the forest path. I wasted an embarassing amount of time trying to figure the pirate area out because of this, and this sort of confusion happens a couple of times throughout the game's near 25-hour runtime. In the end, though, this one didn't bother me that much because there's always the internet if you're truly stuck and can't figure something out. The difficulty spike bosses didn't bother me either, because every time that happened, I could overcome rthe issue by backtracking and finding a few more health upgrades and that allowed me to defeat the previously seemingly unbeatable boss and that's just how this genre should work.
In short, a very good game, the rare Ubisoft surprise from the studio that almost always delivers their most surprisingly good games (so maybe it shouldn't be that surprising), with a few flaws that hold it back from being a masterpiece. Even with the mistakes and flaws, this is still far better than you might expect from the company and anyone who likes Prince games or metroidvanias should play this if they haven't already.