Brain-aching puzzles
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is essentially an old school-style platform game, albeit with a few modern day twists and a pretty, though far from spectacular, graphical face-lift. The style of gameplay is very simple. You start from point A and need to get to point B by swinging and leaping around using the Prince's athletic prowess, avoiding traps, defeating monsters, and working out some head-scratchingly challenging environment-based puzzles.Collecting orbs along the way from smashed crockery and fallen beasts, the Prince has a variety of familiar moves in his arsenal allowing him to wall run, leap huge gaps and swing from pole to pole. It's a move-set that has hardly been tinkered with since The Sands of Time but it does feel refined and controlling the Prince feels intuitive and natural so that when you do chain together moves he flows from platform to platform with fluidity and style.
Variety largely comes in the form of the clever level design and it's working out to get past areas that provides the most entertainment, despite some annoying camera angles threatening to spoil the fun. The puzzles are made more enjoyable by some notable innovations to the series that add to the well implemented time-shifting "Sands of Time" ability which allows you to rewind time.
Continued overleaf...
