For whatever reason, it is apparently a long-standing tradition that Prince of Persia games, despite being mostly known and well-regarded for platforming, must feature combat. From the very first game, it's been an aspect shoehorned in that is always to the game's detriment. At best, it's simply There and unobtrusive (Two Thrones, '08) and at worst, there's way too much of it and it's not fun anyway (Warrior Within). This one goes in the "at worst" pile.

The Lost Crown takes heavy inspiration from character-action games, with launchers, midair combos, parries, etc. It's not a terrible idea, except that by filling every area full of ass holes that are constantly shooting things at you from offscreen, the already sometimes-tedious navigation is made even more irritating. It's bad enough that some areas have almost no fast travel points, forcing you to jump through mazes of spikes every time you want to go anywhere. The game also has the now-standard for the genre reverse difficulty curve, where early on enemies are damage sponges that delete your life bar in 2 hits, but by about a third through the game nothing poses a legitimate threat anymore.

This is interesting to me, because the game Lost Crown takes the most inspiration from is clearly Blasphemous. You can obtain a bunch of equippable amulets that function similarly to the figurines in Blasphemous (though dumbed-down and without the interesting synergies), it has health potions that refresh at save points, and bosses are often teleporting around and shooting lasers all over the damn place.

But The Lost Crown has one glaring issue in particular, and it's inexcusable for a search action game: exploration often feels like a waste of time. So many secret areas I found just led to dead ends with a couple of stupid-ass crystals in them. Oh boy! I can use these to upgrade amulets, except there are only 3 or 4 of them actually worth using. And they take several hundred crystals to upgrade, while most of these Secret Areas give you like... 30. You can get that many from killing 2 or 3 enemies. Sure, in Metroid you might just find a missile tank or something, but hey, at least then you can hold more missiles! These crystals stopped doing jack crap about halfway through the game! Or you might find a lame recolor skin after suffering through a particularly harrowing platforming sequence. Because everyone wants a lilac-colored Sargon, apparently. Every time this happened, it felt like the game had spat in my eye and kicked me in the nuts, and it really destroyed my enjoyment overall.

The platforming mostly works fine, though it can glitch out, like the rest of the game. In particular, air-dashing onto the corner of a ledge often makes Sargon get stuck on it for a second, jittering around like he's in Jacob's Ladder. Oh, and those other glitches? Be prepared for softlocks, missing geometry, Sargon floating around on the ground unable to jump, and more. This thing needed a bit longer in the oven.

The plot is pretty stupid. Sargon's fellow Immortals act like total dipshits for most of the game. I'm not sure why every PoP since Sands of Time has to be about Time, with the exception of the unfairly maligned 2008 reboot, but there is some cool stuff in here. There's a weird little old man who sounds like Richard Ayoade. That's neat.

I feel like people are cutting this game a lot of slack because it's a Ubisoft game that's not a 200 hour map-vomit clusterfuck. And, to its credit, it does have two great quality of life ideas that every game in the genre should have: the ability to take screenshots that then appear on the map, and indications of where nearby save stations are. It's too bad that everything else here misses the mark.

Hey, not everything can be as good as Touhou Luna Nights.

5/10