Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Review (PC) | 2024's First Banger Release

After 14 long years, the legendary Prince of Persia series finally continues with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a brand-new action-adventure by Ubisoft Montpellier. And it’s a home run: The Lost Crown is a fantastic game, that is at the forefront of its genre and the series and that could end up being a dark horse for game of the year discussions at the end of the year.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Review | The Bottom Line

• The Lost Crown is a fantastic metroidvania action-adventure, that is extremely fun to play and engaging throughout
• The story is surprisingly fun and engaging, but has too many lulls throughout
• Boss fights are continuously a highlight
• Combat is snappy and fun, but becomes somewhat repetitive and could have benefited from more options
• Movement is incredibly fun. Parkour is a big part of the game, in the main path as well as through optional challenges
• The game suffers from too many lulls and issues with rewarding exploration, but…
• … it always manages to draw you back into the magic

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

• 

  $49.99

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Fridging The Prince

In the prologue of The Lost Crown (TLC), the game quickly hits series fans with a surprise: you’re not playing the Prince this time and are instead taking control of Sargon, a soldier of the legendary Persian elite unit called Immortals. The prince is actually fridged for the story, as he becomes the damsel in distress of the whole narrative. In the beginning of the game, Prince Ghassan is being kidnapped and taken to Mount Qaf, the game’s main location.

Sargon and the Immortals follow and try to rescue Ghassan. This simple backdrop works pretty well, especially thanks to some interesting twists and sharp writing for every character. The Immortals are all archetypes, but they’re written in fun, sharp ways.

The presentation is excellent as well. The game is rendered in 3D, but the main perspective is from the side like in a 2D game. In cutscenes (and for special attacks), the game zooms out of that perspective though and takes full advantage of the 3D world. This effect always got me and the juxtaposition works extremely well, especially with the special attack animations. Combined with the impeccable style, beautiful use of colors and continuously great design, The Lost Crown is a visual treat.

While the story is surprisingly fun and engaging in the beginning, it unfortunately can’t sustain the strong first impression. Throughout TLC, there are just too many lulls in the story where either absolutely nothing happens, or the game sends you back to areas you have already seen or both happens. The fun momentum from the beginning is quite quickly squandered and never really picks up again, with a few key exceptions.

Slaying And Parkouring

Thankfully, the game is still a ton of fun to play throughout. One of the core gameplay pillars is the combat system. Fights feel crunchy, Sargon is snappy, powerful and nimble, combos are fun to experiment with and special abilities are fun and impactful. The parry system is a great addition as well. Some downsides and confusing design decisions drag the great combat down though.

The main issue is a lack of variety. Sargon’s main weapon are dual-wield swords and a bow, and they remain the main weapons throughout the game. You can do a lot of fun stuff with this tool set, including air juggling, fun dodge action and combos. But the move set is not huge and with only one weapon, the combat can eventually feel repetitive.

A welcome break from the standard action in The Lost Crown comes from the boss fights. They are highlights throughout the entire game, offering engaging challenges, and unique set pieces.

The greatest strength of TLC is the movement. Sargon is very quick and agile and feels like a dream to control. Combining his speed and the numerous movement abilities, like air dashes and double jumps, is incredibly fun throughout the entire game. In typical Prince of Persia fashion, you have to navigate many tricky parkour sections, full of traps like saw blades, spikes and the like. What was a huge strength of the 3D Sands of Time games has been beautifully translated into 2D.

And Ubisoft Montpellier knows how to capitalize this strength. Wherever you go in the game, you constantly have to parkour your way through tricky and cleverly designed gauntlets and it never stops being exciting and rewarding to jump, slide and dash around.

A lot of these gauntlets can get pretty challenging as well. In terms of its parkour, TLC is not always easy. While it never quite reaches the difficulty spikes of hardcore platformers like Super Meat Boy or Celeste, it’s not that far off. This is especially true of the countless optional areas in the game. While the main path offers fun, but manageable challenges everywhere, outside of it is where you’ll find the toughest challenges of the game, some of which took me countless attempts to master and overcome.

Sands of Time? More Like Waste of Time!

Unfortunately, seeking out these optional paths counts among the least fun I had in the game. Again, just controlling Sargon and doing the platforming is always fun enough. But the game’s large size, combined with somewhat disappointing rewards, can turn exploration into a bit of a chore. One of the biggest misses here is in the aforementioned amulet system. You can equip charms which will give you special abilities, like more health, one more hit on your combo or more damage in the air.

It’s a nice system and allows for a surprising amount of theory crafting. But I quickly had a strong combination of amulets, which I didn’t want to change. So I only swapped out amulets a few times after the initial hours of the game. Exploring vast environments to find new ones, or to find special currencies to upgrade them, therefore rarely felt that motivating.

Pair that with the fact that the really good upgrade materials, like the ones you need to get more health or upgrade your weapon, are mostly found on the golden path, and I was sometimes left wondering if I explored for much else than the super fun parkour challenges.

These issues I had with the exploration, combined with frequent lulls in the story, regular took some wind out of my sails. Too often did I feel the amazing fun I had slowly slipping away from you, like sand going through my fingers. Still, whenever I drifted off and started to get bored, the game would always eventually gets its hooks back into me. Whether that was with a cool new ability, an exciting new area, a mesmerizing set piece or another fun platforming challenge. The magic of Prince of Persia always caught back up with me and dazzled me throughout the game.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Review | Verdict

I really loved The Lost Crown. Metroidvanias are among my favorite games and this is definitely one of the strongest games in the genre, at least in parts. The movement is just incredible and I could run and jump with Sargon until the moon turns blue. Combat is crunchy and satisfying, but could have been expanded with more weapons, a larger combo variety and more systems in general.

While many elements of the game are masterfully crafted, the overall experience suffers a bit from a lack of content, an overreliance on backtracking paired with too many lulls in the story and some systems feeling a bit undercooked. But none of that ruins the experience. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a fantastic game and easily one of my favorite Ubisoft games ever.

Rating: 88/100

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

• 

  $49.99

Here you can buy Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown!

Without any extra charge, you can support EarlyGame through the link! This won't cost you anything extra, and we still get a small commission. It's a win-win situation for both parties! Keep in mind that the article price may change.