Prince of Persia The Lost Crown is great on the same virtues that makes other modern classics like Sekiro Shadows Die Twice great- on the purest level, it feels good to play. The combat is simple 2D sword fighting – think the Mega Man Zero games or the swords in Dead Cells, but everything reacts with this simple mechanic exactly how you think it will – hit enemies always go in the trajectory you expect them to, the upwards and downwards attacks are refined to perfection, and the swings all have a tangible heft to them without slowing the pace of the combat down in the slightest. All this combined makes combos a joy to learn and execute – it feels like learning combos in Super Smash Bros, though far more streamlined and easily learnt.  In addition to these attacks, Sargon (the player character) has a dodge and parry and learning to use both of these is crucial in order to beat the game – it’s not that hard (at least on normal difficulty), but it does require learning how to fully utilize your moveset. The final combat mechanic is a meter that fills while attacking enemies that can be spent to execute an ultimate attack. The ultimate attack can be chosen by the player and can range from a strong projectile to creating a massive tornado that destroys any enemy in its path, but the stronger the attack, the more meter it costs to use. All good action games are really just rhythm games, and The Lost Crown is no exception – all these elements coalesce to create flow state inducing boss fights that demand you to get better at the game and are always satisfying to conquer. 

The other half of the game is standard Metroidvania exploration – go around the world, find areas you can’t get to, find powerups, use those powerups to access those previously inaccessible regions, rinse and repeat. Of course, The Lost Crown does do some things to make this more interesting – defeating enemies along the way is always entertaining, the platforming can get Celeste levels of intense, and the map is far more open than other, more linear Metroidvanias. The standard quality of life features are present – a detailed map, quick travel, healing at save points, etc., but the game also offers something that all Metroidvanias should – a camera that captures pictures of the environment that can be viewed later. This is supremely useful, as it helps the player figure out where the hell they’re supposed to go after getting a powerup, which is a large pain point in lots of games in the genre, to the point that some just resort to outright telling the player where to go. This adds up to create exploration that’s always interesting and fresh throughout the 15 hour runtime of the game, something that lots of its contemporaries can’t say. 

But yet, for every brilliant stride the game makes in evolving the Metroidvania genre, it gets held back by a Ubisoft-ism. Yes, the camera system is brilliant, but why is the number of photos you can take limited? This doesn’t make the eventual camera upgrades feel useful, it hampers a potentially great feature into one that the game actively disincentivizes using. And while the combat system is great, not doing the “optional” tutorials puts you at a massive monetary disadvantage early on, which dulls the nature of its inherent intuitiveness as the game feels a need to explain everything to you anyways. And while exploration is enjoyable, it becomes less so with the RPG-ification that plagues so many modern games – no, I don’t want to do sidequests, I want to explore the world on my own accord without some NPC telling me what to do and where to go. With all this considered, I don’t think the game is a masterpiece in the Metroidvania genre as so many have claimed, but it is ultimately a very good one that manages to stand out in an extremely crowded field and the team at Ubisoft Montpellier should be very proud of what they’ve made, regardless of any events that may have transpired after the game’s release.