The Rogue Prince of Persia – Review

September 1, 2025 Off By Markus Norat

GAME INFORMATION
Release date: August 20, 2025 (version 1.0, after early access period starting on May 27, 2024)
Players: 1 (single player)
Genre: Action, Platform, Roguelite / Roguelike
Developer: Evil Empire
Publisher: Ubisoft
Available languages: Interface and subtitles in multiple languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese (simplified and traditional) and others
Available on platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Steam and Game Pass). Versions for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 confirmed for 2025
Age rating: 12 years (fantasy violence and action themes)
Game reviewed on the platform: PlayStation 5

I’m always chasing that perfect roguelite loop. The feeling of starting over after a fall, tweaking a tiny piece of your build, mastering a new shortcut, and returning to the arena with a smile on your face is pure fuel for me. The Rogue Prince of Persia tapped into that exact vein, but with something I’ve loved for decades: the Prince of Persia DNA. Before long, I was running along walls like they were extensions of the floor, stringing together vaults and dashes with metronome-like precision, and turning tense combat into a calculated dance.

The starting point is clear and captivating. Ctesiphon lies in ruins under siege by the Huns, and after the prince’s fall, an artifact allows me to rise from the ashes at the Oasis and try another route, another answer, another outcome. Each run returned me to the hub, where allies emerged and services were unlocked. Returning isn’t a punishment; it’s part of the progression. The city constantly beckoned me out with distinct biomes, small mysteries scattered among NPCs, alternate routes, and objectives that rearranged the order of events.

I joined out of curiosity, stayed for the parkour, and became hooked on the entire package. This is a roguelite that understands how to transform movement into a system, a system into a style, and a style into a gameplay identity. Below, I’ll share in detail everything I experienced during my hours playing on PlayStation 5.

Mechanics and Gameplay

The Rogue Prince of Persia is an action side-scrolling game that builds its gameplay around three pillars: mobility, opportunity sensing, and build synergies. The result is a cycle where traversing the environment is as enjoyable as battling, and battling well always starts with how you traverse.

Mobility first. The prince runs along background walls, climbs, leaps from columns, vaults over enemies, kicks to reposition the threat, dives for heavy falls, and seamlessly weaves it all together. At first, I thought the wall run would be a one-off, but I quickly realized it’s the core of the design: the rooms are designed so I can chain wall runs with jumps, a kick to stun, and a vault that leaves me on the other side of the opponent, opening up the flank for a well-placed critical hit. In several sections, traversal takes over from combat and becomes a mini-platforming test with saws, collapsing floors, timed platforms, and towers that demand rhythm.

Vayu’s Breath, the invisible beat. The mechanic that won me over was the meter that rewards clean execution. When you time a jump correctly, finish off an enemy with precision, or complete a movement sequence without stumbling, the meter fills and activates a state of speed and accelerated animations. In practice, it’s as if the game tells you I’ve timed the music correctly. My movement speeds up, the flow of combat changes, and if my build cooperates, I stack bonuses that encourage me to maintain the cadence. When this happens, traversing a biome becomes a conscious choreography: dash, wall run, vault, special move, kick, reposition, repeat.

Weapons, tools, and critical conditions. The arsenal offers a real variety of behavior. There are fast fists for those who like close-range pressure, heavy weapons with a special that alters elemental status, daggers with critical windows linked to a well-executed vault. Most importantly, almost every weapon comes with a different critical condition that changes the way I approach each enemy. I found myself shifting mindsets when equipping something new: with one weapon, I wanted to start high and land hard, with another, I’d throw the enemy into a trap, with another, I’d force the vault to trigger the critical sequence. The tools, activated by accumulating energy, function as tactical spikes to open up space in tighter encounters.

Medallions and synergies. This is where the game stops being just about execution and becomes about planning. Medallions are passive modifiers that drive my creativity: bonus damage under specific conditions, projectile fire when a special move is triggered, status effects that correlate with a weapon’s critical condition. The best runs were born when a weapon with a conditional critical hit found two or three medallions that expanded that path. In one, I stacked speed and critical damage to the point of traversing arenas like a whirlwind. In another, I invested in crowd control with ground effects that slow pursuers, creating safe lines of attack between platforms.

Progress and calculated risk. In each run, I collected coins for shops and a persistent resource that needs to be banked at altars at the beginning of biomes. The temptation to break the altar for a bigger gain is there, but dying with a full purse hurts. The game loves to offer me this risk versus reward in microdecisions, which keeps each attempt tense in the right way. Outside of the run, permanent skill trees unlock quality of life: more starting health, more potions, revealing rewards before entering areas, resurrecting once. It’s a goal that serves to pave the way for mastery of the system without stealing the spotlight from the execution.

Routes and objectives. Oasis isn’t just a hub; it’s a mental route board. By exploring carefully, I unlocked new biomes, opened alternate doors, accepted small requests from NPCs, and watched dialogues react to completed tasks. Not everything is linear. Sometimes I needed to backtrack, sometimes a shortcut appeared, sometimes a boss changed their tone because I’d done my homework on a different path. This intertwining is the glue between narrative and progression and provides a great excuse to deviate from the most obvious path.

Overall, the gameplay is about keeping your body moving with intention. When the execution fits and the build matches my style, The Rogue Prince of Persia becomes the kind of game where you say one more run and stay up all night.

Graphics

There’s a clear leap forward in art direction. The visuals embrace a stylized comic-book aesthetic with clean cuts, clear silhouettes, and special attention to animation . The prince has generous frame rates for key movements, making his wall runs, vaults, and charged attacks legible. Enemies vary in shape, weight, and body language, so I learn to read threats almost without the interface.

The biomes not only change palettes, but also climate and topology. Underground aqueducts in rounded corridors, docks overrun with twisted structures, majestic archives with colossal gears, golden gardens with parkour-friendly surfaces. Each area plays with the core mechanics in its own way, and the art direction reinforces this with backgrounds that seem to beckon my character to run through them.

The art overhaul applied to the characters and environments gives the whole thing consistency. Skin tones and materials are more natural, lighting enhances edges and planes without exaggerating brightness, and stylized textures add richness without cluttering. In very busy fights, when status effects, projectiles, and effects accumulate, occasional visual pollution can occur , but this is the exception rather than the rule. On PS5, 4K clarity and framerate stability help maintain smooth readability even when the screen is choppy.

Sound

The soundtrack is a spectacle in itself. A fusion of Persian instruments and scales with modern electronic beats creates a sonic identity that makes Vayu’s Breath seem inevitable. The tracks have a pulse that matches the cadence of the gameplay, and within minutes, I was synchronizing jumps, dashes, and special moves to the groove.

The effects reinforce the physicality of the combat. The kick has a pleasant dry crack, the vault has a breath that signals timing, critical hits have a sonic shimmer that differentiates a common hit from a perfect one. Auditory feedback ties cause and effect together.

The lack of voice acting in the dialogue is the only point where the audio fails to elevate the material. The personalities are there, the writing is well-intentioned, but the voices would be part of this world overflowing from the speakers. Still, musically, it’s one of those albums you reach for outside of the game, and that says a lot.

Fun

Fun is subjective, of course, but here it comes from three very concrete sources.

First, the motion loop . Walking around Ctesiphon is pleasurable in itself. When I stopped thinking about buttons and started thinking about trajectories, the city became a playground of diagonal lines. It’s the experience of taming a system that wants to be pushed to its limits.

Second, the builds’ flexibility . I found myself chasing specific synergies as if they were rare sets. There’s pleasure in both digging for the perfect combination and making do with what’s dropped, and the game gives me tools for both paths. The existence of different routes and alternative biomes prevents saturation and encourages experimentation.

Third, progression respects my time . A complete run isn’t endless, so repeating doesn’t get boring. And when I wanted to spice things up, the post-final-release difficulty modifiers allowed me to scale the challenge just right. It’s a rare balance between accessibility and depth, opening doors for beginners without displacing veterans.

The result is simple to explain and hard to put down. I played for hours at a time, and when I wasn’t playing, I was thinking about wall lines I wanted to try when I came back.

Performance and Optimization

On PlayStation 5 , the experience was solid. The game ran at a stable 60 frames per second during traversal and combat, even in crowded arenas. Input response is immediate, which is vital in a game so reliant on precise execution. Visually, the 4K presentation preserves clean edges and layer readability, and HDR adds a sleek glow to each biome’s palettes.

Not everything is perfect. Loading between biomes can take longer than I’d like, breaking the trance of a run that was otherwise hypnotically paced. In very chaotic situations, I noticed occasional visual clutter that requires extra attention to avoid missing attack telemetry or the shadow of a projectile. These are rare but noticeable moments.

On the meta side, the skill trees fulfill their role of giving subsequent attempts a boost. However, after a handful of good runs, some lines lose their impact and leave the feeling that they could go beyond the classic package of health, potions, and conveniences. Nothing detracts from the core structure, and the studio has done a decent job of keeping the technical core polished, but there’s room for refinement in loading times and the brilliance of the endgame meta.

Conclusion

The Rogue Prince of Persia is an example of when a design philosophy embraces a theme, and the two grow together. The fantasy of the prince defying fate has always been guided by time and movement, and the roguelite genre provides the perfect framework for this. Here, restarting isn’t punishment; it’s thematic coherence. Wall-running isn’t a gimmick; it’s language. Vayu’s Breath isn’t just any buff; it’s the metronome of the experience.

I went in looking for a good roguelite and found a game that, besides being excellent within the genre, honors the franchise it bears its name. The audiovisual package is stylish, the music is memorable, the combat is lively, the exploration rewards curiosity, and the builds allow each run to tell a different story. It could use voice acting to elevate the emotional beats, reduce loading times between biomes, and give more depth to the skill trees, but none of this takes away from the brilliance of the essentials: controlling this prince is a delight.

Recommended. In fact, highly recommended if you enjoy games that transform execution into expression. If your heart beats to the rhythm of metroidvanias and roguelites, here’s a new favorite. And if you’re just arriving, even better: few experiences are as welcoming and simultaneously as challenging as learning to draw lines on the walls of Ctesiphon.

Positive Points:

Sublime mobility with wall runs, vaults, and dashes that naturally link together
Vayu’s Breath transforms precise execution into a rewarding flow state
Varied arsenal with critical conditions that change the approach to combat
Medallions that open space for creative synergies and striking builds
Visually distinct biomes that dialogue with the core mechanics
Striking soundtrack that matches the rhythm of the gameplay
Framerate stability on PS5 and sharp visuals in 4K
Alternative routes, small objectives and NPCs that enrich exploration
Difficulty modifiers that extend the endgame the right way