Review #522: Prince of Persia - The Forgotten Sands(Nintendo DS)

 After these games, Ubisoft did seem to forget about the Prince...

The Prince won't even smile on the DS' cover, despite the kiddy art direction.

 Not content with trying to revive the Prince on home consoles at the time, Ubisoft gave it another go on the DS. For those not in the know, the Prince had had two appearances on the DS before, the misguided Battles of Prince of Persia and The Fallen King. The Forgotten Sands on the DS takes after the latter, a game that was welcomed with very low scores and much scorn, both due to its silly aesthetics and stylus-only controls.

 You play as our beloved Prince, having fallen victim to a cult's ceremony which robbed him of his memories. Luckily, he comes across his blade, which is possessed by a friendly djinn who'll aid the Prince throughout all 40-or so stages. The story is barely present, although it has a few nice pieces of artwork. Sadly, the game's graphics are very... childish, you play as a cute, tiny version of the Prince as he defeats other cutesy enemies while avoiding razor-sharp blades.

Even when swarmed.. the game is relatively easy.

 The game is played entirely with the Stylus, for good and bad. The game feels very automatic as a result, since you just tap and hold to the right or left of the Prince and he'll automatically run there, automatically jumping over any gap on his way, or run on walls when needed. You'll also need to roll, by double tapping on the screen, which barely works when needed, as well as jump from wall to wall, which sometimes the Prince has trouble realizing that you want him to jump from the wall he is clinging to. Controls work about 85% of the time, which frankly is something to be proud about. The developers deserve some praise for managing to cram so many of the Prince's actions onto the stylus, you'll be doing a lot of stylish platforming, like jumping from moving pole to moving pole and then land on a platform and then quickly wall jumping before the ground falls beneath your feet. A lot of the excitement from the console game's parkour segments has been replicated here, which is nothing short of fantastic.

 The game fares a bit worse on the combat department, the game will read your slashes as taps most of the time, which will make you vault over the enemy instead of slashing him. Not that it really matters since combat is so easy, like most of the game. You also get a few Time powers, like slowing down time or rewinding time, but the latter is a bit wonky, to say the least. The game's rewind length is hard to pinpoint, so sometimes it won't be able to go as far back as you need to save yourself. Another time, after rewinding time, it propelled me beyond the stage's bounds, which made me die upon falling back to the ground. It feels very janky, like it needed more polishing. There's also an ungodly amount of waiting, since the game will engage in short, but numerous and unskippable, cutscenes almost every single time that a door closes or you step on a switch, just to show you what has happened... even if the door that closed or opened is directly in front of you. It sounds like a small nit pick, but the frequency of these do add up, making you wait quite a bit of time on the whole.

Razia is like Navi, but not as annoying.

 The game is made up of forty or so levels... but they are very short. You can unlock a secret stage on every chapter, for a total of four bonus stages, by going into the Start menu and... moving the camera towards a.... light source...? You don't even get a sound acknowledging that a new stage has been unlocked, you simply pan the camera to the left, on the stage select, and see if a new red dot has appeared. There's no bonus reward for clearing this, but you can collect more money to spend on upgrades or costumes. Not that you really need it, since money is relatively plentiful.

 The Forgotten Sands on the DS... is not as bad as it could've been. A bit too simple and automatic for my tastes, and the unnecessary, but mandatory, stylus-only control scheme is too imprecise for my tastes, even if it's better than a lot of other games that tried the same gimmick. While the kiddy artstyle is not a good fit for the series... it's not too bad of a game, and there's some fun to be had with it.
 5.0 out of 10