Prince Of Persia Similar Games

[Leola]

TheLost Crown excels in both the elements that make for a great Prince of Persia: platforming and combat. The 3D games sometimes struggle with cameras that can be tough to wrangle in tight spaces or that make it difficult to gauge distances, and often solve the problem by just locking the camera in place in tricky spots. Combat has a similar problem: parkour-like fighting moves are always cool, but it can be tough to pull them off well, especially against multiple opponents. By bringing the whole game to a 2D viewpoint, The Lost Crown is able to hone in on precise, snappy controls that always feel great and you can always see exactly what you need to.

Like The Sands of Time and 2008's Prince of Persia reboot, The Lost Crown constitutes a reimagining of the series' concept, striking out in its own direction but maintaining some familiarity. The enticing basics are the same: As a quick, acrobatic protagonist, you explore a massive, semi-ruined location covered in deadly traps and filled with various soldiers and monsters you must overcome with strength and cunning, and time shenanigans are afoot. The similarities end there, though, as The Lost Crown tells a new story based in Persian mythology, leaning into an adventure filled with cool characters that are often pretty interesting, although the plot can get tripped up in its details and delivery as you explore the maze-like map.

At the heart of the tale are the Immortals, a group of seven nearly superheroic warriors, dispatched to the legendary Mount Qaf to rescue the kidnapped prince of Persia, Ghassan. You play as Sargon, the youngest and most brash of the group, whose struggles both with proving his place among the Immortals and with chasing down his mentor, responsible for the kidnapping, make him a compelling character throughout the twisty, though somewhat predictable, journey. Sargon is a fierce, fast warrior, and while this is a Metroidvania and unlocking new abilities over time is an essential element of the formula, he's a capable fighter from the start. In fact, The Lost Crown's focus on giving you plenty of tools in combat right away is a huge part of why it works so well. Fighting enemies is as compelling as exploring the sprawling map thanks to combat that emphasizes speed, reaction time, and pressing your advantage.

Adding to the thrill is the fact that combat is so damn stylish. Sargon and the other Immortals who appear as NPCs zip across battlefields at impossible speeds as bright colors splash over the background. You don't have a proper block, but you can parry some moves, and parrying specific, powerful attacks triggers a quick execution cutscene that eliminates regular enemies outright with flair, rewarding you for understanding your opponent and reacting quickly. Miss a parry, however, and you're left vulnerable; The Lost Crown will show you just how bad you messed up with a giant splash of red as you take your hit.

Never is combat better than in boss battles, though. All the same rules of regular battles apply, with attacks that can be parried and some that trigger counters to land a huge, cinematic hit. But bosses all have similar tools to your own, like unparryable moves that have to be dodged, and even their own Athra abilities that you have to learn and avoid.

The other half of The Lost Crown is its platforming gauntlet. As with combat, platforming is consistently excellent. In fact, your abilities are often so useful that you can work your way around obstacles with ingenuity rather than by unlocking a particular move. A few times, slipping under a ledge with a dash and linking that into a double jump, or carefully timing wall jumps, got me to places I didn't initially think I could reach. You can never perform quite so well that you wind up in places before you belong there (though I'm sure speedrunners will find a way to do just that), but there are a few times when being adept in platforming feels extra rewarding as you scale a mountain wall or across a deadly precipice.

The Lost Crown discards the time-rewinding power that defined most of the Prince of Persia games by allowing you to undo mistakes. Instead, when you fail during a platforming section, you're just returned to the last chunk of solid ground you touched with a little damage to your health bar. As long as you're not out of health, you're free to try again immediately. It isn't as thematically neat as the rewind feature, but it is functionally a quicker, cleaner approach to allowing you to adjust for your errors. It's rare that a platforming section feels too long or is annoying to repeat since you can make additional attempts almost instantly, and you only really suffer consequences when you fully run out of health.

Mount Qaf itself is a big map with a lot of impressive areas, each with a different feel and slate of mechanics. Again, the ideas at play here aren't rewriting the Metroidvania playbook, but they serve very well to provide a lot of variety and interesting obstacles. Each has its own vibes, enemies, and ideas, like an underground pirate harbor filled with explosives and ambushes, and an academy area where keeping quiet is necessary to avoid a towering, overzealous, blind librarian. You'll revisit each location over and over again as you unlock new abilities that make additional areas accessible, and they're all different enough that return trips remain interesting even late in the campaign.

Even after I finished, the whole tale seemed to have a few lingering plot holes. It might be that part of the story is locked behind the biggest and most arduous side quest, or it could be that the many collectible lore items are meant to fill in the gaps. But unless you attempt to get reasonably close to 100-percent completion, The Lost Crown leaves parts of its story untold and, as a result, other parts are confusing. As much as I liked the characters throughout, its conclusion was somewhat unsatisfying due to what seemed like missing pieces.

I fell in love with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time way back in 2003, when it helped redefine 3D action-adventure games with its clever rewind ability enhancing its environmental puzzles and fast, acrobatic combat. But while the aughts saw a bunch of sequels with similar elements, none ever quite hit the same heights as The Sands of Time \u2013 and the 2010s were a parched desert for the series. But like an oasis, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown finally nails what I loved about those classic Prince of Persia games, and it does so by placing the series' best ideas within a 2D Metroidvania framework that calls back to the roots of the 1989 original.

This combat system often moves at an almost breakneck pace. Sargon's speed is his greatest advantage, and even basic enemies hit hard enough that you need to take them seriously. It\u2019s a balance that creates situations where you always need to be reading enemy movements, and your best bet is usually to keep moving and keep attacking. The threat most enemies present kept every battle exciting and important across my 25 hours in Mount Qaf, even on the \"normal\" difficulty mode, and the fun comes from learning to master everything at your disposal. The Lost Crown sports four difficulty options, as well as the ability to customize things like enemy health and damage and parry window size, and combat is exciting enough that I'm looking forward to starting new runs on the tougher levels to put my skills to the test.

One of The Lost Crown\u2019s best ideas is to increase its focus on melee action beyond what you might expect from a Metroidvania\u2019s combat system \u2014 almost Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice meets Devil May Cry. Your goal in fights is to create and maintain combos that can give you an advantage. Kicking smaller enemies into the air allows you to juggle them and keep them from fighting back, while the goal with larger enemies is usually to get behind their defenses to evade their blows while ravaging them with your own. In addition to regular strikes, upward and downward attacks, and aerial maneuvers, Sargon also has moves that chain off dodges and slides, and heavier attacks that can be charged up or change depending on when you execute them in a chain. You wind up with lots of different moves at your disposal that can be linked together in different ways depending on the situation and the enemy you're fighting. All of Sargon's attacks are simple and easy to execute, but still made him feel like a fierce warrior at all times, especially as I learned how to read opponents and pull off combos that allowed me to absolutely dominate them.

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