Prince of Persia The Lost Crown

Excellent game, one of the best Metroidvanias I've ever played. It felt a bit slow at the start, but it was never slow enough for me to drop it. By the midway point, around 15 or so hours, it started to feel great and fast. The narrative and story were pretty good too. Pretty rare to see in this genre. While the cutscenes were long, it was nice to at least get a story where I don't need lore explainer docs. The highlight for me was definitely the platforming. Not only was the platforming the smoothest and most fluid I've ever felt among Metroidvanias, but full-on platformers as well. The momentum and flow of the fantastically designed map and platforming challenges felt amazing. As a matter of fact, I wish there were more platforming challenges. The flow state feeling I got from the platforming in this game scratches an itch I didn't know I had. The amulet system mimics the design of Hollow Knight's charm system. However, I think Hollow Knight's charm system has much more variety and competition for slots. In The Lost Crown, there are amulets that are clearly far better choices than others, and it definitely stunted the buildcrafting aspects. It's no real issue, but it's something I think could be better with more diversity. The combat system's pretty good, and has quite a bit of depth. I played on Immortal difficulty, and felt like some parts of the game were definitely a little too unbalanced/difficult, but this is partially my fault, since I refused to turn it down. The places where I noticed this the most were in the Divine Challenges and a few gauntlets. The combat-based Divine Challenges were just too hard on Immortal. But I do think that the bosses were designed well and tested thoroughly for all difficulties. The thing I liked the least about the combat system was how Athra worked, but this is more a controls issue than anything else. My largest problems with this game are pretty much all controls-related. By default, you move with left stick, and D-pad's bound to some actions. You can change this, and for 99% of the game, it works without fail. The 1% is what bothers me. When you bind Movement to D-pad, it also binds Ranged Attack + Chakra aim to it. This makes no sense and quite literally makes me have to open the menu, bind Movement back to left stick for the sections that require analog aiming of the Chakra, and then swap it back to D-pad... I despise 2D side-scroller movement using a stick; it feels very inaccurate to me, so I refuse to keep it on left stick. When you map Dash/Dodge to any button other than a trigger, you can't hold to sprint. This isn't a big issue, cause it's not bad on a trigger, but I'm used to it on LB instead of LT, so it took a little getting used to. Now I wish that the Chakra aiming was the only problem with this, but unfortunately there's more to that 1%. By the end of the game, you'll have unlocked a lot of abilities, and I would say it's too many, but I think that the causes of most of the problems are due to poor implementations. When you use D-pad movement, and have reached the end of the game, you end up with 1 too many actions for the buttons on your controller. And for some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason, you can't fully unbind an action, nor bind left stick directions to actions, but you can overlap them... So at the end of the game, I have Clairvoyance overlapping with Memory Shard... YOU DON'T EVEN ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ NEED MEMORY SHARD AT THE END OF THE GAME, AND IT MOST DEFINITELY DOESN'T NEED TO BE BOUND WITHIN THE GAME, THIS ABILITY COULD JUST BE USABLE WITHIN THE MAP MENU! So because of this stupid design, I have to go into the map menu and delete Memory Shards left each time I use Clairvoyance, or just use all the shards, and have it do nothing. This is so stupid to me, lmao. Now let's get back to what I said about Athra. You have 2 usable Athra abilities you can choose to activate while holding the Attack bind, but to activate them, you have to press other action binds. The second layer of binds only shows up in the HUD while you have attack held. This feels terrible to me, and resulted in me basically never using Athra abilities. They should ideally be activated with a movement direction combination instead, and have persistent HUD buttons in the UI. I really like this game, and definitely highly recommend it. I just wish the devs would improve the control scheme on controller.