"Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown" Review

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montpellier

Available for: Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

Reviewed for: Playstation 5

I've only played one Prince of Persia game: the last one in the original 3D trilogy. And the reason I picked up this latest installment is not because of the fact that I liked the one game I played. I've avoided every other Prince of Persia since then. So...why did I decide to spend my money on this reimagining of one of Ubisoft's original IPs? Well, for one thing, Ubisoft put out a free demo, which is an unusually consumer-friendly move for them. So, I played the demo and I really enjoyed it! That's the major reason. In addition, it's a rare thing for Ubisoft to try something new with one of their IPs, and The Lost Crown is a complete departure from the 3D platforming formula that propelled Prince of Persia to a household name. With all that said, I decided to go into The Lost Crown with an open mind. But here's the thing...if you read all the way through my GOTY lists for 2023, you were likely expecting this to be the first review I put out in 2024. And if you read my actual first review of 2024 (Persona 3: Reload), you know that The Lost Crown eventually fell off for me. So clearly this review is shaping up to be a rollercoaster! Strap yourself in, keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times, and remember to have fun!

In Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, you actually don't play as the titular Prince of Persia. Rather, you play as Sargon: a member of Persia's elite warrior squad. After the actual Prince of Persia is kidnapped by Sargon's mentor, he and the other top-tier Persian warriors follow in the kidnapper's footsteps to an ancient mountain seemingly trapped in time. And that's where I'm going to leave the story. But I'll say this: the story isn't anything to write home about, neither are any of the characters. But if you're going into a Ubisoft title hoping for a good story and characters these days, you're delusional. So, that's the end of this section.

Now, gameplay. This is a Metroidvania, so you likely know what to expect: a sprawling map that is restrictive at first, but gradually opens up as you gain more abilities through the story. But first and foremost, this is a platformer. So moment-to-moment gameplay is all about performing acrobatic feats to get through challenging gauntlets and reach hard-to-reach secrets. At first the only thing you can do is jump through the air and bounce off of walls. But as the game progresses, you get a mid-air dash, a double jump, a physical "checkpoint" of sorts that you can return to in an instant, etc. And to Ubisoft's credit, the platforming puzzles they came up with for these abilities are, to a point, excellent. You might, for example, only be able to make a retracting platform come back out by pulling a lever directly below it. You might, at first, hit that lever, then pull off the acrobatics necessary to reach the newly-revealed platform, only to find that the platform retracts again in too short a time window for you to reach it. In this case, you might make it work by doing those aformentioned acrobatics first and leave one of those checkpoints directly above where the platform comes out. Then, you might hit the lever and instantly return to the checkpoint to land on the platform and jump to the next area you need to jump to before it retracts again. It's great stuff that shows a lot of inspired work behind the puzzle design! 

But beyond the platforming, there's also combat. You have two weapons at your disposal: swords and a bow. You have a limited supply of arrows between checkpoint areas (not the checkpoints you can leave for platforming), but they come in handy for taking care of airborne enemies. So you'll spend most of your combat time swashbuckling. In addition to the regular slashes, you can also parry enemy attacks for an insta-kill attack for nearly everything except bosses. You can also use some of your platforming abilities in a combat context. For instance, let's stick with the checkpoint ability as an example. Some enemies have shields, and they'll make excellent use of them! So...what's there to do? At first, the only thing you can do is jump over them to attack from behind, but they can turn around pretty quickly...so sometimes you'll be on the receiving end of the shield by the time you land. But, once you unlock that checkpointing ability, you can leave a checkpoint on the battle field, lure the enemy to either side of that checkpoint, instantly return to that position, and start attacking before they even realize you disappeared. This is far from the only application of your platforming abilities, but I think it's an excellent example. 

If you're like me, this all sounds excellent. As I said, when I played the demo for free, I loved the experience. So...why did the experience eventually fall off for me? The answer is simple: the massive difficulty spike that starts at around the halfway point (at least, I think it's the halfway point). Eventually, pulling off complex platforming maneuvers doesn't rely on using your skills in clever ways...instead, it starts relying on how hard you press the jump button and memorizing the exact timing that each moment of a given challenge requires and executing on this timing with absolutely zero mistakes. And the checkpointing for a given challenge starts to get less and less reasonable. The challenge that eventually made me quit was one with no checkpoints at all, but lasted something like 10 minutes. 10 minutes of tough platforming with no checkpoints. It was an optional challenge, but this is just an extra extreme example. Mandatory challenges don't take as long as 10 minutes, but the checkpoints are just too few and far between and the challenges between them are too fiddly. The cherry on top of this is that when you fail a platforming section and respawn at the last checkpoint with slightly less health, the most annoying sound plays and it gets higher-and-higher pitched with each time it plays. Imagine the most halfhearted Kevin's fanclub from Spongebob "wah, wah, waaaaaaah"-adjacent sound effect imaginable, and you have the sound you'll be hearing over and over and over again as the game progresses. So not only does the game get frustrating in its difficulty, it adds insult to injury with that sound. And it's such a shame, because the early-to-mid game challenges are just challenging enough to be fun. You'll likely fail over and over, but each failure comes with a sense of "I can do this, I've just gotta do this thing a little differently." So, that's one of the reasons this game fell off for me...

The other reason is the game's technical state. You can take the Prince of Persia out of the Ubisoft but you can't take the Ubisoft out of the Prince of Persia. This game may be bereft of microtransactions and unnecessary bloat, but it's still a Ubisoft game. So, it's not a strong technical package. It's a much stronger technical package than any other Ubisoft product, but it's still not great. There are framerate drops, for one thing, which is unforgivable in a platformer, where timing is king. In addition, I had the game soft crash on me once or twice. As it stands, I also had one or two semi-hard crashes. In a typical hard crash, everything freezes and you have to restart the console by unplugging it and re-plugging it. In the hard crashes I had with this game, controller inputs simply stopped registering and there was nothing I could do about it except for pressing the PS button to restart the game from the home screen. So, not a typical hard crash, but a hard crash for all intents and purposes. But there's more that distinguishes these hard crashes from the soft crashes than the name and characteristics. The soft crashes had no rhyme or reason. Not great, but fair enough, I guess. The hard crashes, on the other hand, happened after accepting a certain late-game side quest. It happened every time I accepted that quest without fail. It didn't matter if I closed the game and re-opened it or turned the entire console off and on again. It happened without fail. By this point in the game I was getting burned out by the difficulty spike, but on the strength of the early game, I was still trying to go for 100%. But when I learned that the game's lack of polish meant I could never achieve that, I decided it wasn't worth it anymore. This level of technical incompetence is already unacceptable, but it just so happens that it was also the final nail in the coffin.

Folks, I'll say this for anything that puts out a free demo: go out and try the demo for this game. If you like what you experience and feel like giving the full game a try, just keep what I've been saying in mind. If you hate what you experience in the demo, then you at least didn't lose any money in the endeavor. It really pains me to have to be as hard on this game as I've been, because this is the rare occurrence where Ubisoft takes chances and stops being a greedy piece of crap. That happens once in a blue moon, so I want more than anything to convince you to spend your money on this game to send a message that taking risks can make money...but I just can't. And while I can't speak to the profits this latest Prince of Persia game has raked in, I have a feeling it isn't enough for Yves Guillemot and his AAAA mindset to make him even consider doing anything other than the usual Ubisoft gray goop from here on out. So, I'm sorry to everyone at Ubisoft that tried their hardest to make this rare risk work, but I can't lie when the results of the hard work aren't worth it. 

Let us review:

Too frustrating to finish - 1.0

Unreasonable difficulty spike - 1.0

Technical troubles - 1.0

Irritating failure noise - 0.5

The final score for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is...

6.5/10 - Almost Good

Better luck next time, Ubisoft, better luck next time.