Usually this is the part when I tell you the first most impressive thing in the game, but as you experience the first couple of minutes you fast realize that you love everything really - the new cel-shaded graphics that is so immersive and brings that cartoony, epic fairy tale feel, while being equally rich in detail as other famous Ubi titles like Assassin's Creed; the subtle yet ever present background music, composed by Stuart Chatwood, the man behind previous Prince games sound scores; or the great voice acting, starring Matt Mullins as the Prince and Kari Wahlgren as the princess Elika.

Based on Assassin's Creed Scimitar engine, Prince of Persia 4 has been optimized enough to run without any problem on medium/high PC platforms. Ubisoft managed to do a well polished job, which is even more admirable since the game comes in PS3 and Xbox360 flavors as well as PC.

The legend says Ohrmazd, the good god, imprisoned Ahriman so he can no longer corrupt the land. But by some unknown twist of fate, Ahriman has escaped and of course his brother Ohrmazd is nowhere to be found. Fortunately, Elika possesses some of his magic powers, and only with your help will have the opportunity to save her people from certain doom.

A cool thing you will notice is that dying, in the "traditional" sense is not possible in Prince 4. But this is badly perceived as "too easy", because falling from high cliffs or getting a mortal wound in combat will still have the same effect as dying and loading the game: Elika will use her teleport ability to grab your hand and save you from imminent danger, and you will find yourself on the latest safe horizontal platform you were standing. Same goes for combat, if you are near death, Elika will push back and temporarily blind your attacker, but he will regain most of his life back.

This is actually an interesting and ingenious approach in an attempt to fix the boring load/save aspect from the game, leaving your focus exclusively to gameplay, and allowing you to have the most out of this game, while still penalizing you in some way if you're wrong. No matter what nay slayers claim, it's never fun to watch a loading screen.

While Ubi believes Assassin's Creed gameplay to be a little too open, Prince 4 still offers you the freedom to venture into an area of your choice, still is non-linear, but it's always very close to the story and guides the player to follow certain paths. This way the game is more intuitive but you still feel you can make a decision.

The Prince doesn't possess time control powers any more unfortunately, but he is a very agile character with good sword fighting skills, as we all know him to be. He owns a cool steel glove which he uses to grind down walls thus being able to descend high cliffs.

Some lessons from the past have also been well learned, and performing jumps and climbs became more interactive: there is an additional key - R - that has to be pressed to continue climbing while running on a wall or to use the glove while in combat; this is in addition to the use key - E.

Your goal in this game is to cleanse the land through certain platforms where Elika can interact and transform the darkness around her into a beautiful, full of life place. Even if you want to go quickly through the game, you still have to play each level at least twice, because once cleansed, magic orbs will appear on the most unusual places, and you will have your chance to be clever and figure out how to collect as many of them as possible.