I've been playing the latest Prince of Persia game for about an hour or two per night for the past week or so and for the most part, it is a really solid game.... but this doesn't mean I am not going to complain about it because that is kind of what I do about any game that I play.
There is no such thing as a game that is completely perfect and while this one is good, there are some aspects of it that I don't particularly care for.
Just as a quick reminder, this game is free for anyone with a PS-Plus Extra membership right now, along with a ton of other Ubisoft games. I can only guess the reason why Ubi is giving away basically their entire catalog of games right now is to try to play nice with the public in regards to their latest Assassin's Creed game not being able to do nearly as well as they need it to as a company.
Whatever the reason for them giving this away, I am happy about it and also, I have no intention of every purchasing the latest Assassin's Creed game and not because of the controversy either.
After defeating the above boss on my 2nd try (he appears very difficult but has massive "tells" on his attacks and therefore isn't that difficult) I move on to another area that is filled more with platforming than it is with enemies. I don't really have a problem with this because it is nice to have a bit of a break from combat for a while.
Just like any of the other areas I have encountered, the new area is absolutely massive and once again, you don't really have a great deal of indication of where the heck you are supposed to go. This is my gripe with the game thus far in a way. While exploration is meant to be a part of any game, these giant areas are actually quite difficult to get from one side of them to the other because of the platforming, and then you arrive at the top of something that was kind of grueling and time-consuming to get through, only to discover that you cannot proceed further.
This section involves a rather long series of vertical climbs where the platforms are not something you can touch at all unless you ring the bells mid-air and the bell's vibration makes them appear briefly. This isn't as difficult to nail as you might be thinking because your bow and arrow auto-aims or at least it does on the settings that I have the game on currently, I suppose it could always be more difficult.
Anyway, this is exciting the first time you do it but then sometimes you arrive at the top only to have the path blocked with no indication as to how the heck you are supposed to get past it. I have been pushing down on the right stick to look as far up, down, and side-to-side as I possibly can, but I see nothing. Then, I have no choice but to go back the way that I came down the large vertical area that lead me there in the first place.
It was last night that this first happened and I wandered around all the surrounding areas as well to try to see what I had missed only to discover nothing, then made the ascent again thinking that perhaps I had missed something there. I did not. This area, at the moment at least, simply is a dead end for now.
There is the added problem of while you are climbing if you make one wrong move, there is a very good chance you are going to fall all the way back down to the bottom and be forced to go through it all again.
This exploration is fun at first, but then once you find yourself going back and forth over and over, it stops being fun and just becomes tedious. At first I was using this time to kill enemies and get the shards that can be spent on upgrades, which I think was the intention, but then I found myself just skipping all the enemies because I was running around in circles. The enemies dont respawn immediately, but they do respawn and this adds another level of kind of annoyance to the exploration.
Also, you can only save at tress called Wak Wak trees and sometimes, these tress are quite far apart. So a lot of your progress can and will be eliminated with a couple of wrong moves. I can only presume this gets more difficult at the game goes on.
Now I am still find with this game and it does appear as though it is rather enormous. I think I would be kind of ticked off if I had paid full price for this game but this is part of the reason why I am almost never an early adopter of a game.
So when you are playing this, be prepared to get frustrated and stuck, frequently. Often, there is simply a dead end with no real indication of why you are stuck or where the heck you are supposed to go. In one instance while I was wandering I had a choice of going right or left and I chose left. This resulted in me getting into a miniboss fight rather than getting to a Wak Wak tree that was just to the right. Thankfully I figured out how to "cheese" the miniboss pretty fast so I was able to get past it even though I was very low on life at the time and with zero potions.
As it stands now I think that this is a pretty good game, but not without its faults