Review #530: Prince of Persia - The Forgotten Sands(PSP)

 Because the PSP is not forgotten.

The prince stands tall in the PSP's elongated box!

 While the PSP proved itself capable of running Warrior Within and Two Thrones, Ubisoft wanted something... less than just port of the Wii version, so what we got was a 2-D sidescroller with 3-D graphics. It's an interesting premise, you get the feeling of the classic PoP, albeit with all the modern obstacles and aesthetics.

 Sometime between Sands of Time and Warrior Within, the Prince finds himself captured by his own father. A fire Djinn knows of a prophecy regarding the Prince's bloodline ending him, so he'll put an end to the family before they end him. The Prince's father locks the Prince in a tower, for his own protection, but another mysterious Djinn appears before the Prince and lends him her power in order to defeat the Djinn. The set-up is pretty interesting, but it's very underdeveloped, you'll not be getting much story with the game, which is kind of a shame since the setup was so promising.

Combat always features 1 or 2 enemies on opposite sides of the screen. Same set-up all the time.

 As the Prince you'll slash your way through enemies, while jumping, climbing, scaling vines, walljumping, wallrunning, jumping from poles and the whole gamut, all in 2-D. They did a great job translating the 3-D Prince's abilities into 2-D, with a very simple control scheme. X jumps, Square slashes and circle rolls, while you also get a ton of context-sensitive abilities. The core moves of the Prince feel great, although you'll have to learn not to be too trigger happy, since the Prince might remember you were tapping X, in a futile effort to make him climb a ledge faster, and thus jump to his death as soon as he climbed the platform.

 The Prince doesn't have access to the dagger of time, but the Djinn lends him time-shifting abilities. Now you have lives, and if you die you restart at the closest checkpoint until they run out, when they do, you'll be transported back to the last fountain you visited, with your entire life stock replenished. It works well, it's fair and it does away with loading times, although I do miss rewinding back time. You control the Prince with the directional pad, while the analog nub is used to switch targets among things that the Djinn can manipulate. While the wisp that represents the djinn stands over an object, or enemy, you can hold R to accelerate it, or L to slow it down. It's a great mechanic, since it affects both platforming and combat.

Armored enemies can heal other enemies. If you obtained the charge attack you can break their armor swiftly.

 Manipulating time is a great mechanic, executed a bit poorly. The puzzles in the game are about quickly figuring out how to affect the environment in order to proceed, so you'll find your self jumping towards a pressurized leak of sand, freezing it in time to use it as a pole, an jump to the next leak and freeze it just before you grab it, rinse and repeat. You'll be freezing sand whirlwinds in order to move them, and then accelerate them to push you upward, slowing down or accelerating moving blades, etc. It's a fantastic idea, and when it works well it's a blast, it just so happens that the Djinn likes to predict, wrongly, what your next target will be. Many times it cost me my life, since maybe I wanted to slow down an incoming spiked log, but the game decided that I wanted to manipulate the sand whirlwind. Some areas were very vexing until I proceeded the way the game wanted me to proceed as opposed to the way I wanted to proceed. Sometimes you'll also be caught unprepared since you were expecting the game to auto-lock on to the upcoming obstacle, but turned out you had to aim at it yourself.

 Unsurprisingly, combat is still the series' weakest point. Firstly, collision detection is a bit wonky, which can make the first boss a major pain in the butt. Secondly, you can affect enemies with time mechanics, and when it works its great, since you can turn a few enemies berserk and have them attack their own allies! But also... sometimes frozen enemies will lose their collision detection, so you can't harm them. A few situations can turn unfair since not every enemy can be jumped over, and there're very few attacks in the the Prince's repertoire. You can unlock a few by spending collected elixir at fountains, but it's better spent on health upgrades. Throughout the game you can unlock three different swords, but each one has a bonus and a drawback. I just equipped the one that made your attacks unblockable at the cost of making you unable to block. But who needs to block if you can just spam square to death? Although it's better if you time it, since your attacks will deal more damage. All in all, passable at best, boring at worst. It would've been nice to have more opportunities to use time manipulation against enemies, like the area in which you can accelerate spiked ceiling tiles to smash your enemies to bits.

For a simple 2-D sidescroller, some stages are rather pretty. Others are quite ugly with muddy textures.

 The Forgotten Sands on the PSP had a lot of promise. It had some fantastic ideas, and while most of the execution was fine, at times it felt like it needed more work. A few levels could've used a bit more polishing, like the infamous rolling boulder sequence in which you've got just the right amount of time to make it through, and a single mistaken button will cost you the entire sequence. A few trap rooms too felt like they were nigh impossible to clear without taking a bit of damage. It's not a bad game to have on the PSP, but it hurts how close they were to making something really fantastic.

 If anything, I'd call this game uneven. Some platforming sections are brilliant, while others falter due to silly technical issues, like the automatic wisp. Combat can be decent, but it grows stale very quickly, since all encounters are basically the same. Some stages look gorgeous and have great level design to match, while others feature ugly looking textures that make some platforms look like part of the background. If you like the Prince, go for it, it's a better alternative than the DS game, but if you don't... approach cautiously.
 6.5 out of 10