Oh CHRIST is this game awful! I hate it! I hate the Prince, I hate Persia and I hate the fucking rotten sand! From the moment I loaded the game and started playing the tutorial level I knew things weren't going to be peachy in Persia. Largely because I died, numerous times. On the lousy TUTORIAL LEVEL I died! Now this isn't my first dance people. I played the original Prince of Persia way back when all he could do was cling to the edge of stuff instead of slipping into oblivion like a ponce. I play games! I'd consider myself a gamer, even, so to perish when the game hasn't even truly started is a step below Turdsville on the map of made up places.

The controls on this game are so sticky and delayed you'd get faster paced action guiding your mates on CITV classic Knightmare, if your mate was particularly stupid and wasn't entirely certain what Diagonal means. You press jump, and sometimes he will jump. Sometimes he will jump up in the air pointlessly, and sometimes he will spring forwards 9 feet into a trap, and sometimes he'll just stand there looking like Jake Gyllenhaal.

The plot, if you were bothered, is as follows. The Prince of Persia [who's name I never actually caught, so I'll be referring to him as Jake Gyllenhaal for the remainder] has just got done with his Sands of Time adventure and nipped off to hang about with his brother Malik, a Gerard Butler looking dude in massive gold shoulder pads the likes of which Dolly Parton can but dream. Unfortunately the ale and singing will have to wait, since Gerard Butler is in the middle of a bit of a war! The Arabs have attacked his kingdom and forced him back into Solomon's Vault, a place you must reach by running up walls, swinging on bars and leaping over traps but Gerard seems to get to on foot just fucking dandy! Once inside Gerard pulls a dick move and releases The Army of King Solomon, basically a bunch of homicidal sand skeletons, in the hopes of getting them to follow his orders and vanquish his enemies. Which they turn out not to be keen on.

Instead they set about vanquishing every fucker in sight forcing Gerard out the door and you up the roof. Eventually Gerard takes a funny turn and gets possessed by Ratash [Horned Uber Demon] and it's up to Jake Gyllenhaal to tidy the whole bally mess up.

If you've ever played one of the newer Prince of Persia games, then this is that. You've got all the 3D platforming the franchise is known for, plus the time powers from Sands of Time, allowing you to rewind to the exact point at which you fucked up so you can helplessly watch it happen again. In addition to being Hiro he's also that other one, who froze things. Jake is granted the ability to freeze water, meaning that any jet or stream can be jumped off or swung upon and also meaning that from the moment you acquire the power, 85% of everything is water based [you go from levels such as The Throne Room and The Prisons to ones called The Aqueduct and The Baths]. Then he can fly, but only straight forwards and not all the time, and towards the end you get the power of recall, which only sort of makes sense in context so I won't bother trying to explain it.

The two main problems with this game are the aforementioned controls, stickier than the cinema floor in a brothel, and the camera, whose bloody minded refusal to show what's in front of you wouldn't be such a problem if you weren't flipping around like a fish on a bouncy castle most of the time. You run across a wall, onto a bar, swing around and leap off on to... nothing. Doom. Where were you supposed to go? You try to move the camera angle around to check out the surrounding area for a plank or ledge, but it won't let you. It shifts 1/4 of a centimetre to the left, 1/3 of a centimetre to the right, giving you the absolute edge of the bit you can already see and therefore have no need. Survival hinges so weightily on the precise movement of Jake Gyllenhaal, not being able to see where you're going and not being able to go there until you've pressed the button a bunch of times and died and rewound and died again is a bit of a pisser.

It took me 2 days to complete Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands [during which time the game awarded me over 800 Gamer Points! Seriously, it was throwing them at me to the point where it was getting embarrassing, and I think I'd have done it in 1 day had I not been forced to switch off the game 5 or 6 times out of sheer fury. Dying over 11 times on the same part and having to repeat the three or four sections to get back to that bit before dying again and so on and so on.

Actually that's another thing. The autosave [IE/ The only save] is as erratic and unpredictable as pushing a washing machine down an escalator. You could be dirty great swathes of land away from a save point, during which time you'd be expected to perform any number of acrobatic impossibilities on time locked spurts of fountain, or you might save, enter a room, wipe your feet and save again for good measure. It's all over the road!

I never really liked the other games in this series that I played, and this one pissed me off to no end, but if what you're looking for is two or so days of eye popping frustration and then a bucket of Gamer Points, give this one a go. Anyone else in the world, don't do this to yourself.