"Legends of Persia" is an older game from 2014. It's a venerable 10 years old at the time of this review. It's also incredibly, laughably bad in quality. But not like your usual amateur/indie game is bad just because the developer was, well, amateur and thus not a professional game developer. This looks like it was built by professional developers who didn't have any budget, competent management, enough time to make the game, and care factor. It's really bad.
Sometimes with a defective game it's easy to put your finger on the defects, like crappy pixel art, locked resolution, construction kit game like RPG Maker or GameGuru, asset flips, mobile apps and so on. Here it's just a whole collection of nothing at all being good in the game. Heck, they couldn't even get the cutscenes right (but there sure are a lot of them... I estimate around 10 minutes just to get into the game, and it's 10 minutes that isn't worth it.
Really basic stuff isn't done... there's no shadows on characters. The assets look bad. Animations are terrible. Nothing is polished. Special attacks and abilities lag or sometimes just don't work at all. It's pretty obvious the "of Persia" part of the name was added to try make this look like Prince of Persia, but it's more of a Diablo ripoff, but a really bad one.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
"Legends of Persia" has the ridiculous, laughable price of $20 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $20 asking price for this game could get you games like "Mirror's Edge", "Prey" or "Stellaris". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. The price tag here is the best part of the game, it's genuinely funny.
