10. The Rise of the Golden Idol (PC)
9. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II (PC)
8. Still Wakes the Deep (XSX)
7. Balatro (PC)
6. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (PS5)
5. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (PC)
4. Animal Well (PC)
3. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (PC)
2. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (PC)
1. Astro Bot (PS5)
Although the platforming in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was mostly decorative, it got me in the mood to play a PS2-style Prince of Persia game again, and luckily The Forgotten Sands was just sitting there ready for me to play it. And while the game definitely felt like Ubisoft cared more about getting it out quickly than polishing it to a shine besides the nice jump to HD visuals for the Sands of Time sub-series, it was still a very entertaining game, at least when you were running on walls and jumping from object to object.
The game supposedly takes place between the first and second in the Sands of Time trilogy, although it doesn't make a particular effort to fit into that story besides giving the prince the limited ability to go back in time and mentioning a couple people like Farah. The prince is visiting his brother's kingdom somewhere, and he gets there during the middle of a siege on his castle, which gets interrupted when his brother foolishly unleashes yet another sand-based evil power he didn't understand, which awakes a bunch of monsters that turn everyone except the two brothers (protected by amulets) into sand. So the prince has to save everybody, while picking up new abilities over time and trying to keep his brother from being corrupted. It's pretty standard middle east fantasy stuff, and while it doesn't hurt the game, it didn't make me want to finish it either - I kept playing because I liked the gameplay, not because I gave a crap about why things were happening. Not a big deal for a video game to have a boring story, but it did feel like a step down after a few previous Prince of Persia games spent so much time developing relationships between the Prince and another character. The supporting characters here didn't have much going on.
The platforming is where it's at, and the game delivers, feeling pretty familiar to fans of the series, even if the controls aren't quite the same. The prince can jump and run up and along walls and grab poles and ledges and beams, and he has to use these abilities to avoid deathtraps and traverse otherwise impassable terrain and solve elaborate yet simple puzzles. He quickly gains the ability to reverse time for several seconds to undo mistakes, and later powers such as freezing running water so he can use it to aid his acrobatics, eventually upping the complexity of his stunts to a level I don't quite remember the previous games reaching. The strength of the series has always been making the prince climb and leap all over the place, and they do a great job of recapturing that here.
Unfortunately, the combat is definitely not up to the challenge, though at least it doesn't seem to obstruct progress as often as in previous games. Still, for a series that's always had issues making fighting monsters as interesting as running around, to see them produce the least fun system they've had yet was pretty frustrating. The new system consists of swatting away large groups of boring enemies with a very simple combo system and a few elemental powers that you can buy upgrades for, but which fail to provide much entertainment to the dull process of whacking a bunch of ineffectually aggressive bad guys until they all fall down. The boss fights are boring also, rarely anything more than hacking at some giant dude's feet while he takes swings at you and you get mobbed by a bunch of generic enemies at the same time. Eventually the game integrates attacking enemies into the platforming, but it never becomes a particularly interesting element of such, and you're left with yet another wasted attempt at making this side of the series nearly as fun as the other.
Like I mentioned a bit before, the production values of the game are decent enough in comparison to the older games, and The Forgotten Sands definitely feels like a budget title more than pretty much anything else I've played on the PS3. While it has better platforming than the last attempt at reinventing Prince of Persia, that still had a look of its own that only this generation of hardware could produce, while The Forgotten Sands looks like they just bumped up the polygon count and lighting effects. The voice acting is nothing special, the music is forgettable, and the sound effects are unreliable at best. It's a fairly buggy game too - repeatedly things that should have worked didn't, and it seemed to get sloppier as it went on. If this had been positioned as a AAA title it probably would have been massively disappointing, but knowing that it was basically pushed out to coincide with the movie and paying less than $20 to get it a year later, with expectations in check, I was mostly pleased with the game. I wanted some fun acrobatic platforming, and I got it, even if everything around it wasn't quite up to snuff.
It's becoming an increasing trend in gaming, especially since the launch of the Xbox 360, to extend the life of games via downloadable content, which is cheaper than traditional expansions but also less substantial. Sometimes the DLC is really lame profiteering crap like paying for cheat codes or content that's already on the disc and just needs to be unlocked, but some developers do really interesting stuff with it. Here's a few of the updates and content packs I've played that are interesting enough to discuss but don't warrant full reviews.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Knights of the Nine
A pretty satisfying and enjoyable new faction quest line for the game. It requires you to erase any infamy you have to get it going, which is annoying if you actually roleplay your character as a jerk, but once you get into the main quest there's a really nice story and progression going on. Some creative moments, decent fights with lots of allies, and the rewards are great - a full set of really good gear and an infinite supply of knights to fight by your side.
Mercenaries 2: Blow It Up Again
It's nice that this was available for free at first, because it's not really worth it otherwise. It comes with four new missions in new areas and two new skins based on Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, complete with goofy voice overs from crappy sound-alikes ( It was developed during the election frenzy). The problem is the skins don't lend themselves to the missions and the missions don't lend themselves to what makes Mercenaries 2 fun, since instead of having a chance to explore and mess around the new environments you're just plopped in a vehicle and told to do something, with not much chance to laugh at the fact that you look like a candidate for major national office. A few of the missions are pretty fun, but it just seems like a rushed job, and you can't even bring the presidential skins into the normal game.
Noby Noby Boy 1.1
Not so much DLC as a pretty substantial addition of content through patching. The new music and sound selection system is nice, multiplayer is wacky as hell, and the players have also managed to reach Mars thanks to some big multipliers randomly given as various lengths were reported. I don't know how far in the solar system or even galaxy this game intends to eventually go, but new areas to run around in with new creatures and objects to eat and crap out is always fun.
Prince of Persia: Epilogue
I mostly enjoyed it while I was playing, but in the end it wasn't worth the time and money. It's a couple more hours of the game, with the difficulty on the platforming stepped up thanks to longer sequences in between solid platforms you can be brought back to after falling. They also took out any semblance of the free-roaming aspect, making it a straight shot from beginning to end. The new boss and power are pretty much rehashes, and any story development ends up to be not worth it, as it ends on pretty much the same note as the main game with little of consequence really happening. Not necessary for anyone looking for some closure and not just more of the game. Not not not not.
Prince of Persia isn't as good as the better parts of the trilogy from the previous generation, but it's a solid beginning to another chapter in the franchise's history. The only thing I can really say it does definitively better is the visuals, and the game really does look amazing. It's not just the technical proficiency of the same engine that did Assassin's Creed, with a consistent frame rate despite massive draw distances. The art style, which the developers call "illustrative", is just gorgeous to look at. Just looking at the environment, especially once it's been healed and returned to its former glory, is always fun. It helps slightly obscure the fact that the gameplay is a bit more limited than I usually like. It might be a mental thing, but the acrobatic platforming seems more forced than it did before. In earlier games, you had to run along walls, swing on polls, climb up columns, and so on to find your way around the world, but you still felt like you were in a place that existed, whether it was a collapsing castle or a city overrun with monsters. Prince of Persia mostly feels like a video game environment with a pretty coat of paint. The platforming is more directly laid out, with specific paths to the next area obviously laid out, just waiting for you to press the right sequence of buttons. The fun of figuring out how you actually get somewhere before you do it is gone, and while running, jumping and grabbing is still enjoyable, and even more out there with new things like clambering across the ceiling, it's only a part of the puzzle.
I also feel like the combat is a big step backwards. People complained about the fighting in the earlier games, and for good reason. Battles went on for too long, and adding a complicated combo system didn't help much. The new game's combat seemed like a good approach at first, with an intuitive attack system and some interesting bosses, but it just got worse as it went on. Enemies start to change into forms that only allow for a specific sort of attack, limiting the freedom that made it interesting, and begin to use way too many scripted moves that require you to hit or mash a button to avoid it, turning it into a tiring affair. Fighting the same boss six times before it was finally finished didn't help keep things interesting, either.
In the same spirit as Farah, sort of, the game introduces Elika, your companion throughout the game. She ends up being important to the gameplay as well as the story, and luckily she's pretty likable. Instead of the ability to rewind time when you screw up and fall to your death, Elika uses her powers to save you and return you to the last place you were safe. While platforming, this means the last normal spot you could stand on, and in combat, it gives the enemy a chance to recover health. Some people think this makes the game too easy, but really it's just different. In some situations, it's actually less forgiving than rewinding time. If you were prone to running out of the sands in earlier games, then dying would send you back to the last checkpoint, and in that way, Elika was helpful. But generally, being returned to where a platforming segment began is harsher than just rewinding a bit to undo a tiny mistake partway through, and her magic actually promotes an awkward tactic in combat. Each subsequent time she saves you, the enemy recovers a smaller portion of their health, so if you have a tendency to screw up while fighting, it makes sense to fail on purpose in the beginning, so doing so later in the fight is less of a setback. Not that it's usually a problem, because it's not Elika that makes the game really easy so much as the overall design of the game, which tends to lead you by the nose to the next plot point.
Although thankfully the plot is decent enough. I'm not a huge fan of the voice actors, who work fine as normal people, but sound out of place in the game's outlandish fantasy setting. You can stop and talk to Elika throughout the game, and too often early on they just try to be clever and it can often fall flat. But as time goes on, they get more serious about their quest and start to know more about each other as people. Even the incidental dialogue while you're running around evolves to show a growing connection between them. The personal relationship makes the otherwise somewhat uninspired plot a bit more engrossing. I wonder how dynamic the story really is, considering the amount of choice you have with how you play through the game. I don't generally think that a world that can be seen in a variety of orders is necessarily more interesting than a carefully constructed single path, but it would be interesting if I ever played it again to see how it changes by going through it in a completely different way. Eventually you heal all the lands and defeat all the enemies and come to the final part of the game back where you started. The whole finale, with the unusual perspective while fighting the boss, and the interactive ending that forces you to do something you might not want to, is pretty compelling, and shows how game designers are continuing to evolve how their products present story. And while the inevitable cliffhanger is a bit disappointing, the actual emotional weight of the decisions made is more than I really expected from the game. In general I find fault with many of the things Prince of Persia does, but I think it's worth experiencing.
