You jump around an area corrupted by evil, you kill a single bad guy, you get Elika to heal the place, then you retrace your steps and collect balls of light in this new lush environment.
The designers decided to make the game’s progression open instead of linear, which gives players more freedom but flattens the difficulty curve to a low horizontal line that a child would have difficulty stumbling over. The enemies are strong and the combat controls clumsy, which means there’s a good chance you’ll die in combat. This might make the game seem easy, but you’ll still have to struggle to get from point A to point B with the usual jumps, dives, and grapples around and through obstacles. Instead, your partner, the princess Elika, will save you if you jump off a cliff or get your ass kicked in combat. Gone are the time-manipulation abilities of the previous games, but I oddly didn’t miss it. Oddly reminiscent of the children’s animated feature Fernguli, the story this time around is about an evil god breaking out of prison, and you have to help the princess save the temple and seal the evil god back in his underground layer by healing the land. The new Prince is slightly better, and the plot is a hell of a lot more interesting than Two Thrones.
PRINCE OF PERSIA 3D CONTROLS SERIES
I didn’t care for the story of the Sands of Time series and found the Robert Smith-like protagonist insufferable. (I say “modern,” because like Mario, Sonic, and Zelda, there are many different generations and iterations of the Prince.) The latest Prince of Persia is the second modern reboot of the franchise. The Two Thrones was the final installment of The Sands of Time Trilogy, which was the first reboot of the iconic platforming franchise. The two games belong to different series.