Though the Prince starts the game with the acrobatic abilities that we all know and love, his repertoire is gradually expanded as you progress, with the ability to rewind time joined by the power to freeze water and conjure missing parts of scenery out of thin air. The introduction of these abilities, and the subsequent learning curve, is handled extremely well and the game constantly forces you to up your game and master your new-found skills. By the time you reach the latter stages, you must combine the techniques to freeze and unfreeze water, swing around poles, teleporting into enemies and bounce of walls with dizzying speed which can be very tricky, but is usually satisfying and frequently just looks cool. There are a couple of occasions where frustration sets in, but (most importantly) failure is usually down to your own errors, not any problems with the game engine.

When you’re not showing off your gymnastic pedigree, there are hordes of skeletal warriors that need to be cut down, and The Forgotten Sands is no slouch in this regard either. Though the fighting system is only a couple notches above button mashing, the clash of steel on bone is delivered with the elegance we’ve come to expect and remains a pleasure throughout. If you’re looking for a complex, deep beat’em up experience, go and buy Bayonetta – fighting in The Forgotten Sands is after all merely a side show to the game’s main focus on platforming – but the combat here is not to be sniffed at. Though only a handful of enemy types feature, the use of combat to break up the platforming is well paced, and the gradual increase in the Princes abilities is well managed.

Beyond the main game, Ubisoft have also included some challenge modes and the opportunity to replay the game in the guise of Ezio Auditore de Firenze from Assassin’s Creed II. Whether these additions add much to the game’s fairly slender running time is down to individual taste, but we’d be more than happy to replay the single player, and the challenges should capably kill half an hour or so!

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is in many ways a very unassuming title; it slinked onto the scene with relatively little fanfare and has had few expectations placed on it by gaming fans, many of whom will likely dismiss it as ‘just another Prince of Persia’ or (at worst) a shoddy movie tie-in.The truth of the matter is that it is neither of these, but then…neither is it going to set the world alight, being very much a rearrangement of ideas that have used in previous entries into the series. It wouldn’t be too unfair to say that this is what The Sands of Time would have looked, played and sounded like had it been made on the current generation of consoles – which, if you’ve played The Sands of Time, can hardly be seen as a criticism. If you’ve never played a Prince of Persia title, this is a great place to start and we can wholeheartedly recommend jumping in. For those more familiar with the series, there’s still much to enjoy here just as long as you don’t expect anything too revolutionary.

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