Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a game of two qualities. The meat of the gameplay, the combat and platforming, are superb and have an enjoyable flow to them. On the other hand, the game’s presentation, story, and exploration elements are woefully underdeveloped. It’s disappointing because Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown had a ton of potential, but I was ultimately underwhelmed by the experience as a whole. 

You play as Sargon, one of the seven Persian immortals who go on a mission to rescue the prince from the cursed Citadel. Time flows strangely in the Citadel, some people age and turn to dust in the matter of hours, while others are seemingly immortal. The god of this land, the Simurgh, has been missing for 30 years and is somehow tied to the prince’s kidnapping. It’s a decent hook, especially considering how actual Persian mythology is woven into the game. But unfortunately, the actual story is just bland once the plot starts developing further. It’s predictable. And I found it difficult to care about anything when all the characters are just entirely forgettable, which isn’t helped by the uninspiring and unenthusiastic voice acting. Not to mention the handful of plot holes and obviously cut content that left me scratching my head. I don’t think a game like this needs an excellent story, but I’d rather minimize the story elements instead of placing a half-baked tale front and center.

When the central gameplay mechanics are so excellent, you don’t need a riveting story. Look at Super Mario or The Legend of Zelda for instance. While they have a story, it is often in the background as you adventure through a variety of creative areas. The environments and gameplay mechanics are at the forefront. I wish that were the case in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, as it does have a solid gameplay foundation. But the game is filled with boring cutscenes, mundane dialogue, uninteresting characters, and paragraphs and paragraphs of lore. 

 Combat in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is satisfying and fast-paced. The game encourages combos and juggling to wreck enemies. There’s a handful of ways to launch enemies into the air: upward swings, low trips, and kicking out of a dash. Keeping enemies airborne and within your attack range is a fun but rewarding method of fighting. An interesting decision about the combo system is that the final attack in the basic button-mashing combo is intentionally terrible. It’s slow, has a long recovery, can’t be canceled into a parry, and knocks enemies far away making it difficult to follow up with more attacks. I think this was smart as it encourages players to come up with their own strategies and combos. I personally loved getting some basic attacks, knocking an enemy up, hitting them a few more times, then knocking them to the ground and finishing the combo with a charged ground slam. 

My one complaint about the combat is the boss fights. The game encourages players to parry enemies to create openings to unleash a combo. Unfortunately, most bosses don’t follow this pattern. The vast majority of their attacks are unable to be parried. Moreover, you can’t launch bosses into combos, you can usually only get a couple of basic hits off. Most fights boil down to just memorizing the boss’s patterns, learning how to dodge them, and then retaliating with a couple basic attacks. While this is usually completely normal for boss fights in games, I think it’s a little disappointing in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. I wish I could utilize more of the fast-paced and aggressive play that is encouraged by parries and juggling combos.

The Prince of Persia series has always been known for its platforming prowess, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is no different. Stringing together wall-jumps, dashes, grapple-hooks, and time-bending shenanigans is a ton of fun. The game starts a little slow when it comes to platforming, but once you start unlocking abilities each challenge is almost like a fast-paced puzzle to determine the order you should be using these abilities in. It’s smooth, snappy, and just the right level of difficulty to feel tough but reasonable. 

While combat and platforming are fun, I was exhausted by the unfulfilling exploration. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a metroidvania, exploration is a key tenet to make these games enjoyable. When backtracking becomes tedious the genre falls apart. The issue with exploration in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is twofold: empty space and rewards. I felt like there was so much wasted space with no enemies or platforming that made getting around the map just boring. Running is slow in relation to how big each area is, and for some reason you have to re-click dash to run through every single screen transition which is annoying. I felt no desire to hunt down collectibles and go for 100% because it was slow and uninteresting to explore areas that I’d already been through. Moreover, the rewards for exploration were underwhelming. Getting steel to upgrade my weapon or health upgrades were nice, but there were so many lore items that I just didn’t care about. When the story of the game is dull, I have no desire to read further about the lore.

The biggest flaw of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is that it simply lacks personality. There’s so many fantastic metroidvanias to play, each with their own aesthetic. When you look at Ori, Hollow Knight, or Blasphemous these games are oozing with charm. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is bland all around. Visually, the game looks generic and cartoony, the characters remind me of something out of Fortnite. The environments look fine but are just uninteresting. The Raging Sea was the exception as it was a visual spectacle of a stormy ocean frozen in time. The soundtrack is Persian inspired but unfortunately forgettable. As previously mentioned, the story and characters are generic. There’s just nothing that makes Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown feel like it stands out amongst the pantheon of metroidvania greatness. 

It’s a shame that a game that has such great gameplay misses on the rest of the execution. Even though combat and platforming were superb, the exploration, story, art style, and music were utterly forgettable. It’s like putting a nicely cooked steak atop a pile of mushy and bland oatmeal. It is for these reasons that I give Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown a 6/10. In a genre that is chock full of games brimming with personality, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown doesn’t do much to stand out.