I wanted to like this game. I wanted to like it so much. I felt like an easy shoe-in for one of my favorite games of the year. I didn't even play the demo because I just knew I was going to love it. I'm already a big fan of the Prince Of Persia games, particularly the Sands Of Time trilogy. I love metroidvanias, especially Metroid Dread and Hollow Knight which this game seems to take direct inspiration from. I love character action games, particularly Devil May Cry. So why, pray tell, is The Lost Crown just not clicking with me?!
Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown is the first mainline entry in the series since Forgotten Sands from 2010, and it's a metroidvania where you play as an "immortal" named Sargon as he searches a massive labyrinth for the kidnapped prince. The Lost Crown takes the series back to its 2D roots, which is actually a pretty great idea. As much as I love the Sands Of Time trilogy, Prince Of Persia as a franchise feels tailor-made for the metroidvania format. The core moment-to-moment gameplay is polished and robust, even from the start. Sargon already comes with a wall jump, a slide, and a sprint, and you get even more powerful from there. Your core platforming movement is tight and navigating these spike-heavy obstacle courses feels as satisfying as in any other PoP game. It can feel a bit too streamlined at points, you won't be finding any of the deliberate platforming puzzles you'd see in Sands Of Time, but it's overall well-executed.
Prince Of Persia has always struggled with combat, so I'm at least pleased to say that The Lost Crown has what is easily the best combat system in the series to date. Ubisoft visibly too a lot of cues from character action games, as TLC's combat has a wide array of combos, juggles, and a big emphasis on parrying and dodging. Once again, Sargon has most of his really important combat moves right from the very start, so it never feels like the game is kneecapping you early on just for the sake of progression. However, as much of an improvement the combat is in The Lost Crown, it suffers from the same exact problem as all the other PoP games... it drags the pacing to a halt. Enemy encounters just feel really long-winded, partially due to just how tanky the enemies are, and partially due to how finicky the parry feels. Parrying puts you at a standstill, the timing feels inconsistent and sometimes even drops inputs, and messing up causes you to lose a ton of health which discourages me from practicing it.
The pacing issues don't end there, though. Despite how fast Sargon feels, The Lost Crown feels bizarrely slow in every way, not just the combat. I feel like Ubisoft tried to compensate for Sargon's fast movement speed by making each room these massive hallways that take a while to work through. There's so many sluggish combat segments and lengthy and precise platforming sequences that only after a few hours, I completely checked out of wanting to explore and find all the collectibles. It also doesn't help that whether or not the collectibles are even useful is a crapshoot between health pickups and weapon upgrades... and useless lore items for a story and world I had zero investment in. I'm not inherently against slow-paced metroidvanias, Hollow Knight is one of my favorites in the genre, but the pacing needs to be consistent. Metroid Dread has breakneck pacing and a constant sense of momentum with combat segments that are over in a second, Hollow Knight is slow and methodical as you take in the world and struggle to survive, The Lost Crown feels like it's trying to do both but fails to do either.
On top of the pacing, The Lost Crown suffers heavily from the dreaded reverse difficulty curve. This is when a game is brutally difficult and punishing at the start of the game due to a lack of resources, an issue games like Symphony Of The Night and Breath Of The Wild suffer from pretty heavily. The Lost Crown starts with you only having three hitpoints. As mentioned before, the enemies are tanky and take a lot of beating, and it takes a while before you can unlock your first few checkpoints, and even longer before you can access a shop to buy upgrades (the initial selection being pretty slim) or a proper tutorial on how to do most of the combos. I died three times in the very first room of the labyrinth alone, frankly I almost quit right there and then.
Now, if you've played the game, you're probably screaming at me that there is a difficulty option system where you can tweak enemy health and damage and parry timing, and that's true. On the accessibility front, The Lost Crown is incredibly robust and that's great. I'm all for accessibility features and being able to tweak your experience, but there's still a caveat there. I'm always going to assume that a game's default settings are the developer's intended experience, and there's a lot of people who wouldn't even think to tweak the settings. So if I find that the default settings have issues in their implementation, I think it's still totally fair to criticize them. That was one of my biggest issues with Mega Man 11, for example. Besides, even tweaking the difficulty doesn't fully fix TLC's pacing issues. You still start the game with very little resources, the parry timing still feels inconsistent even at its easiest, and the world map still takes too long to navigate.
As far as production values go, The Lost Crown certainly has a lot of them. It's visually slick and polished, there's a bombastic orchestral score and full voice acting even for the in-game dialogue, and it's a big game too. The map is huge, there's tons of collectibles to find and side quests to do, upgrades and skins to get, it'll take you a while to fully complete. However, despite the impressive budget, I found myself with unfortunately little to latch onto. The story is fine but predictable, and while the Sands Of Time trilogy was carried by Yuri Lowenthal's defining performance as the prince, none of the voice acting in TLC came anywhere close to being as instantly iconic. The focus on Iranian mythology is certainly cool, but as a whole, the temporal labyrinth of Mount Qaf just doesn't have the engaging world-building of other metroidvania settings, especially considering those aforementioned lore items are sheer nothing burgers of substance. The sound design is also really poor, combat doesn't feel anywhere near as satisfying as it should be, and the aforementioned orchestral soundtrack just goes in one ear and out the other. The whole game has this AAA sheen to it and while it leads to some impressive production values, it also left The Lost Crown feeling somewhat soulless.
In theory, Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown is an incredibly well-executed game with tight movement, robust combat, a huge world to explore, and a lot of production values. However, with severe pacing issues and a presentation that just doesn't wow, I ended up checking out of the game pretty early. I couldn't even bring myself to finish it. If you really liked TLC, that's great, I'm happy for you. For me, though, this was probably my first big disappointment of the year.
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