Looking for a challenge? Well, look elsewhere...
The combat system's the same. At first it appears to be incredibly weird and boring, there's no blocking, just hacking, jumping and couple rolls to it. But, it appears to be like that only because of the numbers of enemies the game has you confront from the beginning. As soon as it throws a group of approximately twenty enemies, the combat system turns out to be absolutely great. Perfect even. It's just fantastic, and it makes such battles with that many foes pretty fun. At the same time these battles are painfully easy, though. Is that a good thing?
I don't think so. The freshest Prince is a terribly low challenge. I would almost compare him with StarKiller. Literally everything in this game is just too easy. From the battles and jumping around (with few extreme exceptions) to puzzles (well, "puzzles"...). However, couple of the boss battles can be fairly tough to say the least. Unfortunately not because of the actual boss being a hard one to take down. It's more because of the desperate camera, which simply can't take her eyes from the boss during such battles. Theoretically that wouldn't have to be a problem, but there usually also are quite a few minions running around during these. Neither that would have to be a problem, but when the camera just keeps staring at the boss while Prince is slowly drowning in the crowd of these minions, the health bar tends to turn empty really fast. Even that could theoretically be okay, should there be some realistic chance to run around the place and break couple vases and heal a little. And that's what this camera successfully prevents happening.
Thankfully these boss battles aren't that regular, and as for the rest of the game...well there really isn't anything to complain about, but there also isn't anything to particularly praise. The story is a pile of horse **** but that was to be expected. I somewhat didn't perceive the music of the game, so I guess it's just not notable enough. The graphics are...an interesting mixture of great textures and oh-my-god-I'm-gonna-throw-up textures, nice lighting, nice face-plays, good animations and awful animations, awesome effects and poor effects...and I could continue like that across two more lines. The level design is repetitive and strongly linear...which is a shame, and I smell some wasted potential here. I payed a bit of attention to the upgrades for about four rounds, after which I just stopped giving a damn about them, and for the last about two hours of gametime I had that shiny notification about them hanging there in the upper right corner of the screen. As for those four extra special tricks (something fiery, something rocky, something icy and some kind of a shock wave), they all are ultra-useless, but...well I gotta admit the upgrade menu would feel way too empty without them. And well...I guess that's all I can say to the game. Just as the titular sand I probably will have some easy time forgetting this game. But, it's a nice relaxing ride worth one playing.
+ The combat system works great in some of the bigger battles, it doesn't bore, some graphical features
- The combat system works so great it makes every single battle too easy, some graphical features, the story, wasted potential here and there, the voice actor of our Prince was kinda lazy behind the mic this time around (or so it seemed to me...)