Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Is the Best Metroidvania Ubisoft Has Ever Published

The foundation is movement, and the movement is superb. Sargon runs, vaults, wall-jumps and air-dashes with a weight and precision that recalls the platforming greats, and the combat is wired directly into that same vocabulary. You are constantly parrying, dodging through enemies to reposition, bouncing off heads, and juggling foes with a bow between sword combos. Yellow-flashing attacks can be parried for a satisfying stagger; red-flashing ones must be dodged. It is a rhythm you learn in your hands, and once it clicks the game becomes a kind of violent dance.

Progression follows the metroidvania template faithfully but with real craft. New Time Powers gate the map in clever ways, a mid-air dash, a shadow-clone that lets you teleport back to a marked position, abilities that manipulate the flow of time to reach places that were closed to you an hour ago. Backtracking never feels like a chore because traversal is such a pleasure and the shortcuts, once opened, are so satisfyingly tidy.

The genuinely clever addition is the Memory Shards system: at any point you can snap a screenshot of your surroundings and pin it to the map, so when you spot a locked door or an out-of-reach chest you can mark it and actually find your way back later without a wiki or a notebook. It is the kind of quality-of-life idea so obviously good that you wonder why the whole genre hasn't been doing it for years, and it single-handedly solves the biggest friction point in open-ended exploration.

Combat scales into a series of exceptional boss fights, elaborate, multi-phase duels that demand you actually understand your parry timing and your movement options, not just mash. Difficulty is broad and generous, with granular sliders for players who want a gentler ride and a punishing option for those who want Mount Qaf to hurt. The critical path is meaty, the optional content is dense, and almost none of it feels like padding. If there is a weak seam it is the story, which is serviceable rather than gripping, and voice performances that occasionally undersell some genuinely strong late-game turns.

The Lost Crown's look drew the loudest complaints before launch, a brighter, more overtly stylised character design that some fans felt clashed with the moody Prince of Persia they carried in their heads. In motion, most of that argument evaporates. Sargon and his enemies animate with a fluidity that makes every dash and parry read cleanly, and the environments of Mount Qaf are the real star: a sunken city, a hall of frozen time, poison-choked depths and a soaring citadel, each with a distinct palette and a strong silhouette.

More importantly for a game this fast, the art always serves legibility. Attack tells are colour-coded and unmistakable, hazards read at a glance, and even the busiest boss arenas never lose you in visual noise, no small feat when the screen is full of projectiles and you are threading between them. Mengatsi Studio's Persian-mythology monster designs are a highlight, grotesque and memorable.

Mehdi Damou and Gareth Coker's soundtrack shifts between propulsive percussion for the fights and gorgeous, melancholy Persian-inflected melodies for the quieter halls, and it does an enormous amount to sell the mountain as an ancient, cursed place. It is a confident, cohesive presentation that only looks divisive in still screenshots.