The Rogue Prince of Persia review – Purple Reign

Who would have thought, 14 years after we’d last gotten a Prince of Persia game that we’d get not one but two new adventures in the same year? 2024 started with a bang thanks to the arrival of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a superb metroidvania from Ubisoft Montpellier, and halfway through the year, Dead Cells studio Evil Empire has dropped the early access launch of The Rogue Prince of Persia. We’ve still got a remake of The Sands of Time to look forward to in the future, but The Rogue Prince of Persia is a thrilling new entry in the franchise that builds on the ideas of Dead Cells while adding a few interesting tweaks of its own to that roguelike formula.

In The Rogue Prince of Persia, you play as the titular prince who comes home to find that his city has fallen to an invading army of Huns. The Prince can rewind time whenever he dies and return to an oasis outside the city, trapping him in a loop where the only way to break free of the cycle is to stop the invasion and save his family. Each death makes you a little wiser and more skilled, and it’s not long before you’re running through the opening levels and expertly eliminating enemies along your way.

Like Dead Cells, The Rogue Prince of Persia mixes speedy attacks with agile evasion, and it’s not long before you start building up an arsenal of weapons and abilities to help you survive gauntlets of demonic enemies. The Prince has his primary melee and ranged attacks, each procedurally generated level contains a random assortment of upgrades or alternative weapons, and vendors allow you to sacrifice gold and blood for more specific items.

Death is inevitable, and upon your demise, you will lose all of those upgrades you so painstakingly gathered together. The good news is that you can gather resources to help access new starting weapons and abilities on each new run, and each level is populated with unlockable waypoints. When you’ve got a pocket full of gold, it’s nice to be able to teleport back to merchants and buy some new gear to increase your odds of survival.

So far, so very Dead Cells, right? Not exactly! While Evil Empire is playing to its strengths, this game does succeed at feeling like a Prince of Persia game from a bygone era. One of the more immediate changes is in combat, as the Prince doesn’t have a dash ability but can instead vault over enemies. It doesn’t sound like much, but as someone who has a muscle memory geared towards dashing thanks to hundreds of hours of Dead Cells, it does require a big adjustment to utilize this ability in battle properly.

While I definitely do miss having the dash option, vaulting is pretty cool and in line with what you’d expect from a Prince of Persia game. With the right ability upgrades, this can be an even deadlier weapon in the Prince’s arsenal than a pair of powered-up daggers, as it can be used to trap opponents with resin, activate poison gas clouds, and hurl knives at your enemies. Once you master this ability and other offensive options like special attacks, stunning enemies, and using the environment to your advantage, the flow of combat already feels superb and exciting to master.

The other big difference here is traversal. Evil Empire has emphasized making exploration fun, and like the golden age of 3D Prince of Persia games, the sky is the limit when you’re navigating through stages. Wall-running is an essential skill to master, and so long as there’s a surface around him, the Prince can easily move across it to reach new spaces. Inside and out of combat, wall-running quickly becomes an organic skill that opens up the game as you reach new vantage points, dodge deadly spike traps, and gain an acrobatic advantage over Hunnic demolition experts and monstrous generals.

Also helping The Rogue Prince of Persia stand out from The Lost Crown is its art direction, which can best be described as a Saturday morning cartoon meets French comic books. A diverse array of colors are used to create a surprisingly warm game, while the Persian influences are used to construct gorgeous levels. Oh, and that soundtrack is an absolute banger so far.

Even in this early access part of its life, The Rogue Prince of Persia stands apart from The Lost Crown. There’s naturally a certain fear that you’re buying the same game twice, but Evil Empire has successfully delivered an experience with a vastly different gameplay loop to master. Whereas The Lost Crown is a deep metroidvania experience–and a damn good one at that!–The Rogue Prince of Persia leans heavily into its roguelike structure and fuses it with plenty of old-school influences from both the Ubisoft and Broderbund Software eras of the franchise. 

The Rogue Prince of Persia enters Early Access on Steam from today, 27 May for PC players. The full game release will be announced at a later date.