Developed for the Xbox 360, PS3, Nintendo Wii, and PC by Ubisoft Montreal

Published by Ubisoft

Rated "T" for Teen. Contains violence.

The romance is gone. I don’t mean out of playing Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia franchise, I mean literally, there is no romance in The Sands of Time. There have been few games over the past decade willing to depict a warrior setting out to save a princess and what had become a cliché best avoided in the industry remained a cherished tradition in Jordan Mechner’s and Ubisoft’s game series. It was one of the few titles that my friends and I could play while our girlfriends or sisters watched. There is something very sincere and earnest about the way the unnamed Prince throws himself through death traps and hangs by his very fingertips over bottomless pits in order to reach the Princess Farah. 2003’s The Sands of Time in particular captured a delightful back-and-forth between the young couple as they refused to acknowledge their feelings at first, an interaction that helped make it an all-time favorite and clearly inspired Hollywood to make a movie based on it. But there is no princess in The Forgotten Sands and I miss her.

Instead we’re given a tale of brotherly love as the story begins anew. Same details and even the same levels and traps at first. Sent out by his father to gain training and experience, the young Prince heads to a palace at the very edge of their domain where his older brother Malik is ruler. He arrives to find the palace about to fall as foreign invaders assault its walls and gates. Unwilling to accept defeat at any cost, Malik decides to evoke an ancient and mystical force known as King Solomon’s Army where demonic soldiers arise from the ground, one for each grain of sand in the desert.

While the supernatural army is successful in repelling the attack, it comes at the cost of a curse that threatens to consume Malik and the world with him, leaving the Prince to work out how to them both.

If you’ve played any of the earlier games in the series you’ll be happy to know that the controls are easier and more forgiving. The fights are now strictly hack-and-slash. Press one button to attack or hold it for a stronger attack. You can combine it with the jump button for aerial finishing moves, but that’s it, making the combat quick, easy, and intense.

The fights, however, are merely breaks from the real activity, the acrobatic puzzles. The prince can climb walls, shimmy across ledges, and leap out to grab flag poles and pillars. He can run along walls, jump back-and-forth between a pair of surfaces to ascend them. Throughout the game you enter large, open areas where you must look around and figure out how to use your acrobatic skills to access out-of-reach levels and doorways.

It’s lonely work this time around. You spend hours and hours in these vast, quiet halls, with no signs of life except for the statues of soldiers encased in time by the cursed sands. Since the prince never leaves the palace, it quickly becomes claustrophobic and repetitive. The hallways and chambers are gorgeous, but after spending six hours in them you’re dying to get out to some place different.

Queen Razia offers a break of sorts. A young and beautiful woman, she represents the supernatural world of the Djinn and you visit her at select intervals where she explains about the magic of her race and its role in cruse effecting Malik. She imbues the Prince with new magical powers designed to keep the puzzles and combat fresh.

The main power is the essential ability to rewind time. The most frustrating aspect of platform puzzles is the ease with which you can miss a jump or get the wrong angle on a climb or swing. Instead of repeating the level again, this power allows you to simply repeat the last jump.

The other powers allow you to select and make pieces of the levels ethereal or liquid. This is a new twist on the old formula and you have to get the timing right, making one wall transparent so you can leap through it only to quickly make the next solid so you can grab hold of it. There’s also a neat system of air travel involving wretched black birds where you leap from one squawking, clawing creature to the next in order to span chasms.

New powers and upgrades are also earned for the combat sequences where points from each battle can be used to trigger magical armor, fire or wind attacks, and general increases in health and damage. While it’s neat to see the visual effects associated with these powers, I found that in most cases it’s simply easier to hack-and-slash through, especially in boss fights where the powers offer little help.

The Forgotten Sands successfully takes the core gameplay elements of the franchise and repeats it again as a variation, making it an excellent choice for anyone discovering the Prince for the first time. For anyone who has played at least one of the titles in the series, there’s little here that’s new. Without the banter and charm that marked the story of the original, I found the now all-too-familiar rooms and chambers closing in, inspiring me to climb the walls, but not in a good way.