Prince of Persia®

A solid game. Worth trying, especially when discounted.

3/5

🗡️"A Gorgeous Reboot That Dared to Be Different"
Let’s get this out of the way: Prince of Persia (2008) is not your typical PoP experience.
If you went in expecting another Sands of Time style action-puzzle romp with brutal platforming and gritty tone, this one probably blindsided you.
This reboot is more of a chill, artsy detour, a cel-shaded, dreamlike adventure that slows things down and asks, “What if parkour was almost meditative?”
You play as a snarky, unnamed "Prince" (voiced by Nolan North, basically doing pre-Uncharted Nathan Drake), who teams up with Elika, a magical companion with a tragic backstory and endless sass.
The two of you parkour across sprawling, painterly environments while purifying corrupted lands and battling creepy shadow creatures.
The game has a loose, open-world structure, letting you tackle areas in the order you want, and every corner looks like a piece of concept art brought to life.
Visually?
Still stunning.
That art direction aged like fine wine.
Smooth animations, glowing color palettes, and painterly textures make this world feel like an epic fable.
The seamless acrobatics between the Prince and Elika also feel fluid and fun to pull off... once you get the hang of the timing.
Now, the divisive stuff:
Combat is flashy but shallow.
It’s mostly one-on-one, almost like a rhythm-based duel system.
Cool at first, but it gets repetitive fast.
And the big elephant in the room, you can’t die.
Elika always saves you with a quick animation.
It’s a clever mechanic to reduce frustration, but it also kills any sense of real danger.
You're never punished for messing up, so eventually, it starts to feel more like a guided tour than a challenge.
The story itself is kind of hit or miss.
There’s chemistry between the Prince and Elika, and the voice acting is solid, but the plot drags a bit.
The game also ends on a controversial note, one of those "Wait... did I just undo everything I fought for?" kind of finales.
Bold?
Yeah.
Satisfying? Debatable...
Final verdict:
Prince of Persia (2008) is a beautiful experiment.
It’s not the most thrilling or mechanically rich game in the series, but it’s got a vibe all its own.
If you can forgive its hand-holding nature and appreciate it as an atmospheric platforming journey with an artsy soul, it’s worth the ride.

What a great game, the story is kinda cliche but the way it's executed is great.
Gameplay is awesome, parkour and climbing is great and fluid, the fighting mechanism is kinda mid but the last boss fight is great.
graphic for 2008 game and i played at 2025 is still great, maybe because i just like the artstyle. idk, but it's great.

the ending is fricking awesome, this game is 9/10

This is way better than I expected! The art is amazing, the game play is fluid and its exciting with some of the best voice acting to make the story really get you into the game. I love it!

soo sigma

i played this game in my childhood and i thought of playing it again it was one of the best prince of persia games i have paid

Great Platformer, decent story which is incomplete and i know OOBISOFT gave up on it! And beautiful artstyle (Once upon a time Ubisoft could make such intricate game worlds)!

this was my childhood game i used to always play , finished the game about 5 times on xbox 360. this would be one of my favourite games <3

good game

:)

this game is beauty, i know it's not as same as the origin of price of persia. But the gameplay and art is relaxing even for platformer game. The best one is Elika, she got character, interesting background and quite usefull as npc

Its still good even its year 2025

A fun game that create such a magical experience!

[table]
[tr]
[th]PROS[/th]
[th]CONS[/th]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]📖 Great story, easy to understand lores[/td]
[td]⏱️ Light Orbs is mandatory to progress the story which makes it a bit time-consuming[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]🎵 Phenomenal sound tracks & Voice-acting[/td]
[td]🖥️ Facial expression was not truly emphasize in certain situation[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]🖥️ Beautiful art-style[/td]
[td]🖥️ Sexiness of female character have been toned down compare to previous entry marking the 1st indication of Ubisoft's Woke downfall in the future. [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]🎮 Smooth combat & movement along with several different variations in both aspects provide an enjoyable gameplay for many hours[/td]
[td][/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]🗺️ Open-world style of map was very well designed[/td]
[td][/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

Gameplay (Movement, Camera, Combat):

- The camera's movement has finally improved as compared to previous entries of Prince of Persia, you can now freely look around the area without having it behave like sticky gum.

- Combat is also a lot smoother, although a bit easier. Implementation of magic, grapple & counter making it challenging enough yet enjoyable.

- Movement for platforming has also improve in a sense of changing a bit how the player gonna traverse. For example: Climbing, jumping, etc. difficulty has been somewhat reduce & if you screw up it doesn't punished you like previous games making it much more fun to explore.

Graphics & Soundtracks

- The game has an art style that sort of mimicking a comic book, which combine excellent soundtracks makes you have a nice, fun, magical experience like you are in a fairy tale.

once I saw the map and completed the first area, I knew that this game will be a repetitive boring mess.
I quite frankly dont care to finish it.
Characters exchange quips that are under delivered by the B voice actors. And writing is shit, maybe thats why voice actors dont care. It feels like a brainded game. If braindead is what you looking for, this is a game for you.
I think 2.9h for me is enough. NEXT

Can anyone know why Xbox controller removed..

5 STARS !!!

Please ignore time played. I've played all the way through this at least a few times just never on Steam. I did play it briefly to test it and it ran smoothly. It did not require any manual fixes
Pros: genuinely does feel different in some important ways from every other Prince of Persia game, when the ones with the Sands Of Time and both Forgotten Sands are very similar to one another. Running on walls(now for longer at a time, including upwards, aided by magic) and ceilings, does feel cool. The ability to ask Elika, your magical companion, for information in a lot of different situations allows the player to choose how much or little of this exposition they want, so by definition you are not given too much or too little. Looks amazing, both as far as graphics and level design go; it is really cool to get to travel around this once great kingdom, and be responsible for restoring it as much as you can. Collecting does not really feel like a chore as it does in some other games, and it is genuinely nice to revisit areas once you have healed the land, since that is how you get are able to collect. Like the Prince of Persia games that came before it, and both versions of the Forgotten Sands, which is as far as I've played by now, this has at least one puzzle that genuinely does require you to apply yourself.
Cons: simply too streamlined, something which worked ok for at least some of the early Assassins Creed games(I can't speak to the later ones, I stopped playing after III), and absolutely does not work for Prince of Persia, since the grit and edge necessary to make one of these work well has been blunted. Way too easy, no matter how many mistakes you make you barely lose any progress(which I appreciate is good for some games, I don't think this franchise fares well with it); essentially it's like if you were incapable of running out of Sands Of Time to rewind, and it took absolutely no skill on your part to pick the right time to start and stop rewinding(it's especially silly because the very first time we see Elika even do it it seems to really exhaust her but there's no cooldown for it in game). The combat is simplistic, too rare, almost always over too quickly and suffers from a severe lack of enemy design variety. Ultimately, overall you do feel overpowered, whether we are talking about the combat or the parkour. I get what they were going for with the relationship between the Prince and Elika - I don't think it completely works(I don't think there's any inherent issue with the classical romance angle).
Mildly recommended for only the very biggest fans of the game play of Prince of Persia
I bought this on sale simply so that I could leave this review in order to help others determine whether or not they want to buy and play this

Prince of Persia (2008) is a strange beast. It strips the franchise down to its core—a focus on movement and style—then wraps it in a cel-shaded aesthetic that still looks fantastic today. The problem is, it often feels more like a tech demo than a finished game.

Platforming remains the highlight. The animations are fluid, movement is responsive, and chaining parkour moves together just feels good. But repetition sets in: revisiting the same zones to collect light seeds breaks the pacing, and the lack of new traversal abilities hurts long-term engagement.

Combat is cinematic, but shallow. Fighting the same bosses with padded health bars becomes a chore. The story itself is passable, but average writing don’t help the pacing.

It’s short, stylish, and occasionally frustrating—but if you’re into breezy platformers with a unique look, there’s still fun to be had.

please i want. no i NEED a sequel of this game, i miss Prince and Elika, let them see the world together

Really good game, even though it's frustrating and stressful in some parts
Shame they never continued the story after that NDS game that most players never heard about or bothered playing

Unlike most old games I have recently played, I haven't actually played this before - so I can actually be unbiased here. The 2008 PoP title does give you a feel of how the 3d Ubisoft parkour games came to be.


The story is very info-dumpy. In fact, the entire story is nothing but info-dumps. However, it isn't forced onto you. You want to know the lore of the lands? You stop at a plain surface and press 'T' to talk to the info-dumper, Elika. Save for some cutscenes, most of the substantial world building is done through these optional conversations. It isn't bad persay, as the info-dumps aren't snorefests due to the chemistry between the titular prince and Elika. Now Elika is not just an info-dump. In fact, she is the in-game reason why my clumsy arse doesn't die at every pillar jump. And did I mention her chemistry with the prince is awesome? Their banter is quite fun and you can feel their relationship growing through the game. The other characters are just boring to be honest, including every single villain. But that didn't matter to me as I was quite properly held on by the main characters.
*SPOILER STARTS* The story is a very basic 'save the world' trope, but with a Last of Us twist. It is basically the exact same storytelling device and executed the exact same way. The only difference is that TLoU had access to better technology and better writers. *SPOILER ENDS*


It is important to note that both the prince and Elika are your playable characters. Sure, you directly control the prince but in both combat and exploration, you use Elika's skills atleast 30% of the time. The main essence of the gameplay is exploration and parkour and NOT combat - so any Sands of Time trilogy fans should not come into the game with this expectation. And the parkour is adequate for 2025. For 2008? I think the og Assassin's Creed did it better. But it does give you more satisfaction to pull it off if you do a perfect run without Elika's save. The world itself is created solely to serve this parkour system. To the extent that you will move through the sections of the world more than twice, with quite a bit of backtracking. That and the collectible system being directly locked into the progression of the story does incentivize a fair bit of backtracking exploration. However, the collecting requirement is not strict at all - with the required collectibles being around 40-50%. So you won't explore to the point of exhaustion...unless you want to collect all 900 of them.
The combat, although not the main draw of the game, is pretty fun. It is more like the QTE in Warrior Within and Two Thrones, and seems to be the basis of those QTE kills. They have a fun combat system with cool animations with quite a lot of their own QTEs. Hence, combat - though scarce, was always fun. And by scarce, I mean that each region will have at most 2 enemy encounters - a short recurring boss of the section and a regular goon.

_____

tldr: Parkour heavy game with sparse combat and quite repetitive exploration, flavoured by an average story. Fun main characters, extremely forgettable side-casts. No encountered bugs.

5.5/10 - It is an extremely average game, but was definitely pretty fun for me (I like old games). Playing it for the first time in 2025 does show its age a lot, but I didn't find myself being offended by any of the dated mechanics.

This game is an underrated masterpiece

Do not buy. This game does not start in 2025. tried changing settings.
the game get stuck on loading screen with some settings and do not show any menu or ui in another setting.
its not playable.
maybe there is a way to make this work but nobody have time for that shit when you can just play other games without any bugs.
the game also dont support 4k resolution as i have checked on launcher setting.

This was one of the first videogames I played back in 2009, I might be biased but I really enjoyed it. It is a quite easy game, even if you take away Elika who prevents you from dying (many times because of your own stupidity). I like it to relax and enjoy the panorama, they put amazing views and you can do parkour across all the map. Also, despite the map not being that large, you can perceive the difference in the design for each place. It's different from other Prince of Persia games, but iI enjoyed it nevertheless
The story could have had a different ending or a sequel, but if I understood well, it didn't sell good so maybe that's why we didn't get more

i hate my self now

At least better than The Forgotten Sands

This is an old X360 game and its still as good and fun as I remember. Its different from the rest of Prince of Persia games. It looks good, you can play it even in 4K and has full controller support, runs perfect on modern hardware and Windows 11. Some of the dialogs between the prince and princess are hilarious, remember to make them talk to eachother frequently.

unpopular opinion, this is the best PoP

intresting art style

very beautiful visuals, good story and characters. lots of parkour - "press the right key at the right moment", the whole game is like this, not everyone might like the game for this reason. level design is something out of this world. the game looks fresh even today, unlike other Prince of Persia games. it is repetitive though, it took me multiple sessions to finish the game.

we need prince of persia 2008 part 2 w

ㅤ

peak

This is NOT Prince of Perisa. This is a Semi-Open World Shadow of the Colossus, Gravity Rush and Ico inspired collectathon video game, with Prince of Persia name slapped on it. They should have named it "Princess of Ahura: Light Seeds of Omazd". Man, you can't hate Ubi enough.

Good Things:
1) No Uplay so you can play it offline.
2) The Map design is very good as everything is connected to everything else.

Worse Things:
1) Unskippable Cutscenes and dialogues
2) The Combat sucks. Gets repetitive real quick. All you do is "Run, Jump, Die, Repeat." except you CANNOT die, the princess will bail you out of the ether for every fatal mistake.
3) The dude's NOT even a Prince.
4) They turned Farah into a literal Donkey. No they did NOT show the donkey, not even for a "that's cute ass" joke.
5) You have to fight the same 4 bosses 6 times each before you fight the final boss.
6) I played it for the story and I found out that there's an "Epilogue" DLC, that Ubi did NOT include in this PC port and never will, citing "business" reasons. So even the story is incomplete. I am not saying the story is not good, I am saying that the story has no proper ending.

Not as good as the original 3 but I enjoyed it none the less.

"Prince of Persia®" is an ancient game from 2008. It's a whopping 17 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions, hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware.

"Prince of Persia®" is a console ported third person parkour platformer and hack and slash brawler that completely fails to capture the essence of the old 2D platformer designed for PC back in 1989... a heady era when game developers and consumers came to realize how amazingly powerful the PC was as an almost untapped resource for quality gaming. And I say that because it helps us explain why this 2008 reboot is so bad.

See, Ubisoft, and it's hard to review a Ubisoft game without considering where it came from, are monstrously derivative and they just keep on digging up their franchises and making them shuffle around Weekend at Bernies style... they'd rather get 50c from a rehash of an old franchise than millions from a new one... risk averse is fine for shareholders but not great for gamers.

Hand in hand with this, Ubisoft tilted away from making excellent PC games towards catering to console peasants, again something they saw as more reliable in terms of income... but as we know, consoles suck.

And you can see where this is going... the console centric Prince of Persia was very poorly recieved on PC as a result of these poor decision from Ubisoft, something we'd seem them double down on over the following decades, letting to terrible share price performance... and terrible, derivative games, soulless corporate (N+1) iterations. Like 2008's Prince of Persia.

It's just not fun. It's a clunky console mess, infested with long, unskippable cutscenes (because even today consoles lack the power to properly allow developers to relate game narrative through the game itself).

A couple of technical issues here, too.

The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at around 1440p, there's no support for the state-of-the-art 4K or higher resolutions. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.

The game is very badly optimised, with low framerates and janky gameplay even on a high end rig. Developers must take the time and polish their games and ensure they are optimised and will play well on any potential customers system.

Because this is designed for consoles, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior console gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for consoles forces upon a game. Once more, console peasants have made gaming worse for everyone.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?

"Prince of Persia®" is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $10 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again.

For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Project Zomboid" or "Metro Exodus". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

Peak nostalgia trip, absolutely loved this game when I was a kid and I can proudly say I still do.

5/10

Cringey dialogue, repetitive gameplay, below average combat.

I picked this up after seeing it on a 'best games of all time' list, and it absolutely lived up to the hype. The main characters are well-written and memorable, and the gameplay hits that perfect balance between fun and challenge without ever becoming too frustrating.

not for all

Cool game 👍
Sad no sequel 😞

Buen juego si lo miras como un juego de plataformas. Es la segunda vez en mi vida que lo juego, y el gameplay me entretiene. El final le resta un monton de puntos, y como es un juego de vergisoft, el epilogo decidieron no lanzarlo en PC, aun asi me gusta menos el final del epilogo asi que.. 6/10

beautiful and calming

Graphics are good but it's a baby game. I'll update this review if I change my mind

Awfully boring.

An oldie but a goodie. Super satisfying gameplay and great soundtrack. You'll definitely like this game if you're into fantasy.

played this for 16 years on ps3. my childhood and favourite game of all time.

love.

Doesn't work on my win 11 .
"Touch button to start" doesn't show up

A work of art.