Prince of Persia: Forgotten Game?

I've mentioned to a few people how much I enjoyed Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. I must have since I got it in the mail, played all the way through it, and sent it back in just over a week. That's some kind of record for me. The platforming and combat were lots of fun. The difficulty was just right, and the story wasn't terrible.

I've heard some comparisons to Sands of Time thrown around, but I think I like parts of this one even better than that game. The combat from SoT seemed really frustrating at times. In this iteration, a lot more enemies are thrown at you at once, but you're also a lot more powerful. Plus, you're given lots of options on how you can dispatch them. So you can pick your favorite combinations. But speaking of combinations, this game's not too heavy on it. You aren't forced to remember ridiculous button combinations so you're freed up to hack and slash, use magic, or whatever works for you.

The level design is pretty neat, but you have to suspend your disbelief that all of the obstacles just HAPPENED to line up perfectly. You really can't spend too much time thinking about it, and just go where the game (not so subtlely) directs you. I found very few spots where I was confused on where to go next. And it does this without falling into the "rhythm game" mentality of the last game.

This game gives you a great mix of "do whatever you want" combat and "extremely directed" acrobatics. It also was hard to stop playing. I often found myself playing "just to the next checkpoint." Only to find myself saying that again when I got there.

Late in the game, the timing puzzles tighten up a bit and leave you less room for error. They don't seem impossible. Rather, they're just reminding you how far you've come. As an example, late in the game right before you open Solomon's tomb, I got to a series of jumps that seemed fairly easy for what I was used to. Of course, I had to back track and was now on the clock. It was ticking down while I retraced what was easy the first time through. Well played, Prince.

Of course, the big mechanic for this series is the ability to rewind time when you mess up a jump. You acquire that fairly early on, but it really takes a back seat to being able to flash freeze water. Horizontal water fountains become bars to twirl around, and waterfalls become solid walls to run across. Later on, it leads to some of the trickiest sequences of having to quickly freeze and unfreeze as you make your way across the obstacles. Almost as an afterthought, you get a "recall" ability to fill in sections of wall that are all Matrix-code-looking. But you can only do one section at a time. Often I'd forget that I had to use this on the thing I was standing on, turn it off and drop to my death. Whoops. I could have used some kind of slight visual indication that "this ground might not be entirely stable."

The title of this post refers to my sense that this game was largely ignored when it shouldn't have been. But I loved it. You might want to give it a shot too.