Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown stands as a great addition to the metroidvania genre. Its blend of intricate traversal platforming intertwined with combat encounters offers players up to fifteen hours of main-story questing and around thirty for completionists. The combat of this Prince of Persia dances between the combo strings akin to “God of War Ragnarok” and the tactical precision of “Final Fantasy XVI”. This game rewards players for mastering timing and execution with stylish maneuvers to assist you on your journey. Traversal and exploration are central points to the game’s experience. The developers allow for two different exploration styles. One that allows you to get lost in its world similar to other metroidvania’s. The second allowing you to use their “Guided Mode” which highlights the general area in which key plot points take place. The visual presentation of this game shines when you’re in between the combat and traversal. Its expansive areas and diverse biomes beg to be explored. Despite its strengths, the narrative falls short with critical story elements that feel undeveloped. Pacing issues and missed opportunities in quest structure raise alarming questions about rushed development time. Overall, the game offers a compelling experience for fans of the metroidvania genre. The ideal price point of entry into this game would be anything $35 below if you’re not fawned over this genre. For those who enjoy metroidvania’s, this game is an easy purchase at MSRP or less.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Lightning Review
Seek the
CROWN
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown stands as a great addition to the metroidvania genre, featuring dynamic combo string combat and intense boss battles. Its expansive areas and diverse biomes provoke traversal contemplation with moments that prompt the question, “How can I ascend to that height?”. Alongside narrative that is easy to follow, yet compels you to engage and seek truth.
Although I have many positive things to say about Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, I encountered some cons while playing in their normal mode. I will do my best to avoid spoilers in this review and give simple examples to paint an overall idea.
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Shining Moments
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown shining moments discovered through the gameplay players will experience as they dedicate up to fifteen hours of time into this metroidvania main-story quest and around thirty hours completing it without a guide. The combat for Prince of Persia is a mixture of action games combos similar to the latest God of War Ragnoark or Final Fantasy XVI. Enemies can be placed into combo strings that allow you to juggle them in the air, removing their ability to fight back. Or even slice and dice them into oblivion while they staggered within a corner. The game also has a parry system that rewards you for proper timings. This feedback is amazing for two reasons. The first offers a visual feast, rewarding those who execute precise timings with distinctive counter attacks. Second, gameplay feedback that rewards a special meter that you can use for additional stylish and powerful moves that feel satisfying with every use.
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Guided Mobility
Strings of Disconnection
The battle system exhibits a sense of disconnection when contrasting the bombastic boss encounters scattered throughout the world with the moment-to-moment enemies that populate every platform along the path to these significant showdowns. The combo strings that are used on the normal minions lurking around are typically useless against boss battles. From my experience, most battle felt very one, two punches being delivered before the enemy casts a unique ability that forces you to dodge or parry. While commendable in most respects, investing time to master a combo string appears futile during these boss fights.
One main-story boss, when confronted, can be launched into the air and juggled for moments until he breaks our combos. In this specific battle, I was delighted to feel that impact of being able to use what I had learned from executing the creatures that stood in my path to reach this boss. However, this feeling doesn't resurface until the penultimate boss, which encompasses all the mobility mechanics gained throughout the journey.
To build off my mobility comment, the traversal and exploring is another important aspect of this game as a 2.5D metroidvania. One option Ubisoft Montpellier delivered to the players is the “Guided Mode”. This allows the player to see the next story beat general location. While showing the general undisclosed area, it still forces you to explore the paths possible. I love this function. My personal play style is knowing where I have to go for the main quest and then carving out my path based on what visually piques my interest or gameplay that makes experiment within an area. Getting lost is a core principle, but I hate that feeling. Having a north star to gaze upon is always helpful for me while still also delivering that aspect.
This should also speak to the level design of the Montpellier team. They create enough space within each region on Mount Qaf, the major location you travel around. You can experiment and test ideas until you come across a mobility barrier that can only be surpassed by progressing through the story. A shining example of this is an area called the Sacred Archives. In this area, you will face an enemy encounter called the Jailer. The Jailers purpose is to capture any unwanted guests, you. From entering the halls of information. The Jailer, blind but with a purple bubble, warns the player to keep their distance to avoid detection. If you trespass its personal bubble, it will teleport to your location and attempt to grab you and send you to a jail cell underneath the location you're navigating. If you don’t possess certain abilities given within the story, you must approach the area timidly and wait and use the little nooks and corners provided by the developer. When you revisit this area with an air dash or double jump. You can play a more interesting game of cat and mouse with the Jailer. The overall mobility tricks this game offers are tight and ask the player to revisit all the locations to see if they execute new solutions to the parkour challenges the developers have built.
Visualization of the Athra
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The visual presentation of the game speaks more volumes than the main-story attempted by the developers. It tackles various biomes that all have distinct characteristics that you won’t forget. Time manipulation is a major point of the Prince of Persia series. There is one level in particular that has bled itself into my mind. The map section visually depicts how a paused moment can impact level design. And how unpausing that same level could create a new combat scenario, environmental challenge in a split second. To avoid gameplay spoilers, I won’t give more detail, but this level is instantly recognizable the moment you encounter it on your journey. If there's a sequel, I hope they engage with this level design more.
My last comment on its visual presentation is how special abilities and boss fights have this mixture of Dragon Ball Z powers blended with Dark Souls bosses woven with Persian mythology. Every time and I mean it. Each encounter with a new boss granted me a new parry scenario or allowed me to witness their use of "Athra" magic. Despite possibly encountering a death screen, seeing it would still spike my dopamine.
Background Truth | Frontloaded Lies
The last topic is the story. If you add up all the main story cut-scenes together, the main-story can be told around two hours. In the narrative’s initial half, I find it unappealing. A retrieval quest of a captured royalty. The intro sequence fails to make me care about the characters, making me unwilling to retrieve the royal member. The intro sequence just enhances my want to pilot the character given on his journey. This character goes by the name of Sargon. As we progress through the second half of the story, several situations happen that make you question the powers we are gaining and how they actually work based on comments made by the cast of characters we encounter.
This is only if you connect specific details within dialogue in cut-scenes and select characters. Here is where my doubts about the game lie. Rewarding the player for exploring the world they built is great, but if your main-story hinges upon a crucial statement hidden by a NPC, it feels like the story didn’t have enough to bake for the main-story to reach that critical point. The open-ended ending exacerbates this problem and makes me feel unsatisfied from a narrative point of view.
Speaking of the unsatisfied critical points, this leads to my concerns about the game. Insufficient time to bake resulted in missing a boss battle from a major game section. Developers had a noticeable rhythm in the game, especially after three hours of gameplay.
Enemy Encounter ~> Traversal ~> Enemy Encounters ~> Traversal / Puzzle ~> Key Location ~> Boss Fight.
The formula is crystal clear, and it strays away from it in quest where every other aspect followed the formula. You then encounter this formula.
Enemy Encounter ~> Traversal ~> Enemy Encounters ~> Puzzle ~> Major Puzzle ~> Key Location.
You could say it’s trying to mix it up, but it’s clearly not the case because there is a character who hates your guts and is the perfect candidate to fight you but is nowhere to be seen when the perfect opportunity reveals itself to the player.
The variable glaring problems bring concern to me about how Ubisoft will deal with the franchise down the road. Will they stick with this style of 2.5D? Or will the developer return to 3D? Even with my problems and concerns, the way they conveyed the Persian mythos in this game had me locked in. Every platform turn and descent kept me locked into an enjoyable seventeen-hour experience. I would recommend this game and give it a solid 8 out of 10. If you’re already a fan of this genre, it’s worth your money; however, if metroidvania isn’t your preferred style, waiting for a price drop is advisable. Any price below $35 dollars is an instant buy.
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