Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown... first impressions

After finishing Nobody Saves the World I was at a loss as to what I should do next. This happens to me every time that I play a game that I really seriously enjoyed. I am aware that no matter what I play next I am going to not like it an this wont necessarily be the game's fault.

My expectations are so high at that point that I am not going to enjoy even good games after playing something that I found wonderful.

So I made a poll about what game to play next and nobody answered (Nobody answered the Poll) so I just went with the one that looked like it had metroidvania aspects to it because I love games like that generally speaking.

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I have a reasonable history with this franchise, including going all the way back to the one that was on PC only and dammit that game was incredibly tough. There wasn't a lot that games could do back in those times so whatever! Today though, systems and computers can do almost anything and my expectations were already high so when I first started playing this, I actually didn't like it, but I'm here to say that you should stick with it even if the initial things don't appeal to you because it gets a lot better.

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The reason why I didn't like the way this game started has a lot to do with what I just finished playing. PoP (Prince of Persia) is VERY story heavy in the opening moments and you, the player, don't actually control very much of it at all. This was very reminiscent of a Square-Enix game in my mind and I get frustrated when this happens. If I wanted to watch a movie I would do exactly that, dammit!

Well, do yourself a favor and endure what I consider to be a completely unnecessary cinematic opening because once you get past that and the tutorial things, the game gets to be much better.

I'm a fan of old-school gaming so the fact that it is 2d actually makes it MORE likely to appeal to me.

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Once they teach you the basic movies like parry, dodge, strike, and charged strike you are off to the races so to speak and your journey of exploration has just begun.

There were times that I thought maybe I had just wandered into a place that was too difficult for me at this level but I was wrong and I simply needed to approach it differently. To a certain degree, the bosses especially require some level of patience. Mad button mashing is going to result in you getting killed, a lot. My first encounter with this was with the 3rd? boss you face in the game named Erlik

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This boss does this charge towards you that is really easy to dodge but then you have a very brief window of opportunity to strike 2, maybe 3 times before he throws an unblockable attack at you that can only be mitigated by being far enough away from him. It also does very heavy damage. My dumb ass was up there bashing away like I had been doing on all the minor enemies I had encountered up to this point. It wont work, basically.

So after running away from him presuming I was in the wrong place I realized that no, I wasn't in the wrong place and a different strategy would be needed. Patience was the key here and you need to accept that you are meant to only be able to get 2 or 3 strikes in and then put some distance between you and it.

There are also some really cool (and sometimes quite difficult) attacks that if you parry them successfully, you will get to do huge damage as a counter-strike. These attacks are not always telegraphed and they appear as yellow on the screen. Erlik had one of these that was a spin attack and I missed the timing many many times until one time, I actually got it right.

This wasn't "souls" hard but it did remind me of how the bosses in Hollow Knight were rarely pushovers and they were meant to be quite difficult to get past even early in the game. Is this a preview of what is coming later? Probably, but since I loved Hollow Knight I will be ok with that.

There is a ton of platforming that is interspersed with battle but one of the things I enjoyed about this game is that when you do get killed (and you will) you don't have to go back very far and if you die at a boss fight, it will allow you to restart JUST the boss fight. This was one of the few things that really annoyed me about Hollow Knight. Losing to a boss in that game often involved a rather lengthy and sometimes pointless run back to the start.

The game graphically speaking, is beautiful. The voiceover work is decent but I'm normally never impressed by such things. The cinematics don't happen too often after the start of the game but honestly, if there is anything you take away from this it is to endure the lengthy cutscenes at the start of the game in order to get to the actual game, because it is really good.

I believe the cinematics can be skipped, so if you are impatient like I am, just skip them. If you find out later that you want to know the lore of what is going on around you there is a section in the pause menu where you can read about it later. For me, I just wanted to play, not watch, this game and once I got past the beginning, this is shaping up to be a wonderful game that I am likely to enjoy immensely.

I think that fans of metroidvania games will agree.

At the moment this is free for all PS-Plus members and I believe anyone that has an Ubi+ or whatever it is called account. So there isn't really any reason to not at least give it a try.