Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Plus, of course, the dual challenge of timing and observation should be relished in an age when many mainstream games are accused of excessive handholding. Even so, a bit more signposting and a more flexible camera may be necessary to keep a lot of people from regularly trekking to GameFAQs.

Key to both complexity and pleasing escalation is the Prince's beefy set of abilities. The emergency-rewind power from Sands of Time returns, albeit limited to auto-returning you to the last safe point rather than allowing any manual control, but the boy with the curtain hair-do is also blessed with control over the elements.

He'll unlock and upgrade these supernatural abilities as the game wears on, and is eventually able to dispatch multiple enemies into clattery bone-piles with a spectacularly destructive summoned tornado, or to temporarily freeze jets of water to create icy poles, walls and pillars he can use to reach otherwise inaccessible areas.

This is what I mean when I bang on about complexity. You'll need to master combos such as laterally wall-running, pressing jump at just the right moment to reach the next ledge before you fall, then jumping again while you've still got momentum, but simultaneously activating your freeze power to turn a horizontal stream of water into a pole, which you then need to swing round-and-round-and-round and then away from before it thaws. Even letting go of the right button at the wrong time will end the run and send you plummeting to earth. It's a real feat of memory, reflex and co-ordination, and I'm ashamed to admit I repeatedly mucked it up.

The Elemental powers really sing in the combat - as well as the aforementioned Air tornado, there's Water's arc of icy spikes, Fire's impassable wall of flame, and Earth's offence and defence mega-buff. With limited energy at your disposal, you need to carefully choose which of these to activate and when. The swordfights aren't simple one-on-one affairs, but instead hectic brawls that see you surrounded by over a dozen murderous sand-demon thingies at once.

The sword-fighting itself, the bread-and-butter of the Prince's graceful combat, is faintly reminiscent of Arkham Asylum's excellent man-thumping. Rather than frenetic button-bashing or convoluted combos, it's about finding and maintaining a rhythm, deftly pinging away from near-fatal strikes before they land and using light attacks to keep the swarm of other bad guys at bay even as you land the killing blow on your current target.

So is Prince of Persia back on track? It's impossible to call it without seeing more and seeing it in context. It's an enormous relief to go back to the brainy environmental puzzles of The Sands of Time, especially with much-improved combat, but there's a concern the muted and repetitious aesthetics and the rather large roster of abilities might make for a less elegant game than its lucid dream of a forefather. Regardless, it's excellently reassuring to find old Princey-pants confidently revisiting his finest hour, and not just running down some corridors and wearing a crude approximation of Jake Gyllenhaal's face.