Prince of Persia: The Fallen King

Last year Ubisoft surprised everyone by Releasing Assassins Creed for the DS, the game was a platformer that expanded upon the story of Assassins Creed, it was a reasonable DS game, but unfortunately it was riddled with bugs and annoying touch screen minigames. Ubisoft is giving DS games another go with Prince of Persia: The Fallen King, which will be accompanying the console versions of the Prince of Persia franchise reboot.

The game acts as a prequel to the new Prince of Persia Game, with the prince accidently setting the Evil King free and proceeding to travel across a generic, desert filled Persia to stop the king.

The Game plays like super Mario bros with platforming across different levels and just like super Mario bros these levels are selected via a large overworld map.
Ubisoft seem to have also taken some tips from last years Zelda Phantom Hourglass and made the game entirely touch screen controlled, you tap were you want to move the prince, you tap enemies to attack them ect.
I found that the touch screen controls work well but are very glitchy often misinterpreting different gestures with the stylus.
The game also features backtracking similar to Zelda Except this Backtracking served no real purpose, for example about 20% into the game one of the characters gets kidnapped and the prince must travel back to one of the first levels to rescue him, in doing this he gained no new abilities or skills and as such this design choice seems like an artificial way to make the game longer.

In Assassins creed Ubisoft tried to port over the style of the game to the DS, with Prince of Persia they have ditched the console style entirely instead going for a new anime look, I found that this style reminded me a lot of “Sonic Chronicles”, unfortunately this anime look clashes with the actual graphics within the game look like a cross between Lego Indiana Jones and New Super Mario Bros. with bland low polygon models that look like bulgy stick figures.

The Sound in the game I found is pretty lackluster featuring generic and boring Desert/Arabic/Persian Music throughout the game, it’s a shame Ubisoft didn’t put more into this part of the game, as I am an avid fan of video game music I found the sound in this game disappointing.

The Major Problem with Prince of Persia is that it suffers from frame rate issues as well as bugs that can cause you much frustration, but the interesting thing is that there is not that much onscreen at any given time yet the game can slow down to a couple of frames per second. I found that the game slows down when there is more than 3 characters on screen and furthermore with the exception of the first 2 levels I never had a perfectly smooth frame rate.

The Length of the game is about 10-12 hours provided you can keep stand the technical issues, however Ubisoft I commend you for Bringing together the best gameplay of New Super Mario Bros with the Best gameplay from Zelda to create one of the best platformer for the DS this year, it’s a shame though because if the technical issues were fixed the game would easily be the best Platformer on the DS.