Fantastic Flash: Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands

by: Christian Walters

"Flash promo games" is a phrase that holds much meaning for many gamers. This meaning is difficult to define in words, but the sensation is about what one would feel when rolling their eyes in annoyed exasperation at the antics of a well-meaning yet sublimely irritating younger cousin. You know they're just excited and wanting to show off, but you just wish they'd stop for the sake of your sanity. Someone at Ubisoft decided that creating a Flash promo game that evokes this response would be a waste of time and possibly detrimental to sales and insisted that the game have entertainment value. That someone succeeded with the Flash promo game for the upcoming Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands.

Now, I love me some Prince of Persia. I played the originals all the time on my mother's 486 computer in her classroom before school, and I succeeded in having my computer privileges revoked for a good week after *ahem* loudly expressing my displeasure at having missed a critical jump for the umpteenth time. Sands of Time was Christmas come early and I even enjoyed Warrior Within's broody broodiness, and the key component that makes this series so durn fun is the runny-jumpy-slashy. When you omit or mishandle the runny-jumpy-slashy, you wind up with Prince of Persia 3D, and you don't want that. Ubisoft took the runny-jumpy-slashy and boiled it down into a highly concentrated reduction for the amuse bouche (sorry, I've been watching Top Chef lately) that is the Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands Flash game.

Consisting of six stages, the game is one big time trial race to the finish. Realizing that holding down the right arrow while attempting to perform acrobatic maneuvers would be bothersome, the designers strapped rocket boots to the Prince and let him go, requiring no input on the player's part to run. The Prince isn't so hot on his own with anything else, however, so it's up to the player to jump, wall climb, roof run, attack, rewind time, and use elemental magic to make it to the end in one piece. In fact, being unable to control most of the Prince's forward progression makes for an interesting challenge as you are denied the luxury of being able to size up your jumps and enemy positions and have to go with instincts and react to dangers as they get thrown your way.
The first stage ends with a meeting with a strange woman who teleports the Prince all around Persia to activate four elemental fountains to gain the power necessary to stop the big bad. The four middle stages each have an elemental theme (wind, water/ice, fire, earth) and a corresponding boss battle, all of which play out similarly to the Barbarian boss battle from Ninja Gaiden: smack him, climb up the wall, jump over, repeat. In each of the given stages, the Prince has access to a related magic power that will be required to make it through the stage and defeat the boss, and in the last stage the Prince is able to cycle through all four to take down the end boss.

Graphically, the game is quite pretty with detailed and fluid sprite animations and it runs reasonably well even on my dinky netbook, though after building up enough speed some of the traps become hard to identify until after the Prince bifurcates himself on a buzzsaw. Controls are responsive enough to avoid being unnecessarily frustrating, and the music, which is just one song most likely lifted directly from the main game, is appropriately dramatic and epic without being annoying. There's even a dash of replay value since the game records your time taken to finish individual levels and the game as a whole, giving you a goal to beat the second time through. Since social networking is all the rage, the game allows you to post the results on Facebook and Twitter to brag and ostensibly challenge friends to beat your best time.

All in all, Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands is a polished bit of promotional material. It's fun to play, it's a quick distraction rather than a time sink, and I think it succeeds in generating interest in the full game without being obnoxiously overt in its sales pitch. Go on over and give it a look-see; you won't be looking for your own Dagger of Time to reclaim time wasted.

The Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands Flash Game [Ubisoft]