Prince of Persia beginner tip: Do NOT put the game on easy

When you first start playing Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, you are likely going to be a bit overwhelmed because unlike other games that are like it, you aren't going to just be able to mad-button-mash your way through even common enemies.

This can be frustrating to many players, including me. Even in some of my favorite platformers of all time such as Hollow Knight there wasn't a lot of button action going on but rather, a series of timed strikes, jumps, and moments to run away a bit. Because parrying is such a big part of this game, you will need to incorporate this into your play style if you want to continue.

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One of the points where you are going to experience this frustration the most early on is with shielded enemies. Your regular attacks and arrows will do nothing to them and normally, you could simply jump over them and strike them from behind...but as you can tell above, the guy in the middle platform there is something you cannot jump over.

I can't say for sure, but I think the game was kind of trying to force you to learn that in order to defeat this character, you either need to create enough space to do a charged attack (which isn't terribly useful because of the long charge time in most situations) or you have to wait and parry one of his attacks and then strike.

There is more than one way to skin a cat as they say and for these guys, you have a lot of options but NONE of them are to run up and spam the basic attack button.

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As you might expect, the first boss you encounter in the game is a bit of a pushover and you are meant to easily be able to get past him. They don't let you have the sensation for very long though, because the 2nd boss, named "Erlik" is anything but a pushover. If you spend too much time standing in front of him, he is going to thwack you with huge damage and some of his attacks are unblockable too. I think that perhaps they wait until the 2nd boss to throw you to the wolves so to speak, and it is here that you start to realize that the bosses in this game are meant to take some level of patience where you figure out their tells and then act accordingly. This results in you perhaps getting very frustrated because I was convinced that I had gone to the wrong area and wasn't meant to be at this guy yet. Turns out you ARE supposed to be there and this is where the game trains you that running in guns blazing isn't going to work in PoP.

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Now I want to talk about a mistake that I made in the game once I felt that the game was becoming "too challenging" for a casual player like me and that is that I went into the settings and changed the difficulty down to "rookie."

This made the game extremely easy as you might expect. The problem with this is that while it was great to be able to advance so nicely, the game was no longer fun. I suppose if you started on Rookie it might be ok, but even though I was only 15% of the way through the game, the difference in how the enemies behaved was massively different to the point of it having almost zero challenge to it.

Let me state this again though: I am NOT a good gamer and even for a filthy casual like myself, this made the game not very fun.

Also, and this is something that you just need to accept, there are portions of the game that are intentionally "too difficult" for most players because the idea here is that you are supposed to be going and spending the little currency pieces that you find on upgrades to your amulets and overall power. It is clear to me that Ubisoft built this in on purpose. The idea here is that extremely talented players will be able to get through certain portions due to their very precise parrying tactics whereas other people are going to need to buff up their skills a bit before this is going to happen.

It isn't a grind like spending hours running back and forth fighting the same enemies over and over again though, it is a fair and reasonable amount of time that you spend exploring, perhaps running back to the areas that you have already been to and maybe even reaching platform areas that you were previously unable to reach.

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_{the first time you face Jahandar, you are going to lose... but if you stuck with the system of learning to parry a bit, you will likely defeat him on your 2nd or 3rd time, like I did}

The real problem with any game when you turn it down to the low difficulty settings is that you get used to the game being a breeze and therefore it stops being exciting. You no longer feel a sense of accomplishment when you parry something or perform a lifting combo that allows you to strike 5 times in a row.

So seriously, recognize that the game is meant to be difficult in certain parts and to just roll with it, learn, and get past it the regular way. I have made this mistake many times in the past when stepping a game down to a lower difficulty and I think one of the main reasons why I consider Hollow Knight to be one of the most awesome games ever made is because they had no difficulty selection: Either you played it as they designed it to be or you didn't play it.

Do yourself a favor and find a way to get through on "warrior" or "normal" difficulty settings.