Title: Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
Genre: 3rd Person Action
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal/Singapore
Publisher: Ubisoft
Rating: BBFC - 12, ESRB - T
Format: PS3, Xbox 360, PC, Wii

Synopsis:
You play as the Prince, riding to the palace where his brother Malik, is currently under siege from an invading army. During the first few minutes of the game, it's clear that Malik is fighting a hopeless battle and is quickly being overwhelmed. He then decides to fall back upon a last resort, the mythical Army of Solomon, to defeat his foes.
Once unleashed, the Army of Solomon breaks free, turning everything living to sand. Led by the Efreeti Ratash, and guided by the Djinni Razia the Prince needs to fight to both save his people, and his brother.

PoP: Forgotten Sands is one of those games that's hard to classify where it falls in the story without help. Ubisoft placed it in the gap between Sands of Time, and Warrior Within, with sand established as a key plot device, and the Prince fine-tuning his fighting skills.

Gameplay is slick, as you'd expect from a series that was setting the bar back in the 1980s, action puzzles aplenty, with some finely grained timing being needed to solve even some of the set pieces in the start of the game. The traps are back in force, with the usual army of axes, spikes, rolling blades, and pitfalls making life a hell of a lot more difficult than a prince should expect.
What adds an extra series of challenges are the powers that Razia bestows upon the Prince, giving him control over the elements themselves, and adding another layer of things to keep an eye on, and another load of curve-balls that the game can throw at you. Once you get the power of water control, expect needing to freeze leaking pipes to make walls to run up, and releasing control when you need to fly through the flow.

Combat is of a special mention, stylised up to 11, with the amount of style you want to apply being only limited to the time you want to spend on each fight. Blitz through it, and it's a little bland, but spend some time on it, and you can make it look seriously cool.



Graphics are gorgeous in 720i (The game doesn't actually output at 1080p, despite being on a full HD TV), with a lot of attention to detail going in to the huge hordes of enemies attacking you at a time, with an insane amount going in to Ratash's model. The one thing that is a let down, is the model detail on the Prince himself is significantly lower, which you really notice, seeing as you're staring in his rough direction all through the game.

There's not really any major faults with the game, aside from a few very minor things, like the disparity between the Prince and Ratash's model details. Enemies fall in their masses, and once upgraded, fall stupefyingly fast.
The game itself is hard to compare to any other game, as the heavy emphasis on all the Prince games has been on not getting pasted across the walls by the myriad of traps, as opposed to anything else.

The only real complaints I have are the length of the game, which is notably a bit on the short side, even when compared to the likes of Dark Void. Another big thing is Ubisoft adding some heavy DRM into the mix. As my internet connection is being attenuated at the moment, it's prone to dropping out every now and again. With one such drop in the middle of a game, the game realised that the connection was dead, and promptly locked the game out for about 15 minutes, at which point it carried on perfectly well.

Scores!

Graphics: Very pretty, high amounts of detail in just about everything. Havok going balls deep during the fights adding a load of extra sparkle gives a lot extra. [color=#blue]A[/color]
Gameplay: Tricky acrobatics puzzler, frustrating in some places, and easy going in some. Variety of approaches keeps things mixed up, huge fights, and massive boss fights add to the changes of pace. A+
Replay: Upgrade system allows you to make tiny tweaks each playthrough, choosing if you want to take the skills or just stat boosts. Hidden breakables, and a mid-sized list of non-story trophies will keep the number whores coming back for more. B

Overall: Solid action platformer, even appealing to this die-hard RPG fan. Hugely let down by the heavy DRM, and some completely unforgiving timing fairly early on holds this back abit. B+

I thought this game was well mint, albeit surprisingly easy. Except for one bit towards the end that made me rage with rage.

And after one playthrough, not a lot left to do other than the challenges, which are again easy.

But yeah, loved it.