DON'T fall for the hype!

This newest installment to the Prince of Persia franchise has forgotten what made this title great. The first Prince of Persia contained amazing visuals, a fantastic and gripping story, and an amazing atmosphere and feel. This newest installment is lacking all of those, but manages to add even more faults to further pull down the series.
First off, rarely do i see a game series gradually become graphically worse with each new sequel. The first Prince of Persia was visually stunning with what seemed to be some sort of filter that mystified the environment creating a whimsical world that enveloped its players. This Prince of Persia looks like a polished Playstation 2 game with mediocre environments, and less than impressive character designs. The hair alone looks like that of the PS2 engine. Its garbage. The body shading looks like flat plains with shaded detail made to look like 3 dimensional design, but doing so poorly. With the examples of what the PS3 can do, this game is nothing more than a flashy PS2 title.
The story that gripped us all in the first Prince of Persia was narrated by the hero himself, as if he were telling his tale directly to the player. It was enticing and fluid. The character acting and accent fit well with the background and kept the theme strong throughout. That, now, has been replaced with a bad american california boy voice with lame comedy to break up the little story flow that exists. Its absolute buchery.
Finally, the game play lacks that same mystifying appeal that pulled us all to the original. In fact, the environment is downright boring. Thank god, there is the option to press triangle and have your path laid out in front of you because the environments look so similar that you wouldn't be able to navigate getting for mundane location to location. Additionally, you are forced into more platforming than you would like by collecting "light seeds" which allow to continue the story. Collecting these white orbs is nothing but redundant. Redundancy is a great word to describe this game. The bosses are so easy that you can defeat them almost as fast as the painstakingly easy enemies you come across now and again.
Seeing that so many people gave this game a good rating perplexes me. I LOVED the first Prince of Persia. Was disappointed in the second, and thought the third was on the track to getting the series back into the spot light, but this newest installment is utter garbage. Its laughable how repetitive the bosses, environment, and over all game play is. The only explanation for other people giving this title anything higher than a 3 out of 5 is its popular name, but nothing more. If you're a fan, give this game a rent before you shell out the 60 bucks. Likely, you will find yourself kicking yourself in the ass for losing the 6 bucks on the rental.