Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

Introduction

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is an unusual review to write, because reading its full negative history reveals almost nothing critical about the actual game. Ubisoft Montpellier built a metroidvania around fast, precise combat and clever time-manipulation platforming, first releasing it 18 January 2024 before it reached Steam that August. It sits at a Very Positive 84.3% across 6,951 all-language reviews, and the specific shape of its criticism sets it apart from almost everything else reviewed this session: 53 of the 100 most-helpful negative reviews are about one thing, and it isn't the game.

One of the best metroidvanias in years

Community tag votes describe exactly what fans love — Metroidvania, Precision Platformer, Great Soundtrack, Atmospheric — and the praise across this review's full negative sample is genuinely striking for how consistent and enthusiastic it is even from reviewers giving the game a thumbs-down overall. "This game is very good," opens one 328-vote review before its actual complaint even starts. Among the top positive reviews, several go considerably further: "Easily the best metroidvania since Hollow Knight," reads one 138-vote review, and another calls it "the best Ubisoft game since Rayman Legends." Combat feels tight and readable, the time-rewind and clone-based traversal abilities layer cleverly onto the platforming, and the hand-animated visual style draws sustained praise from nearly every corner of the review corpus. On the strength of the actual game alone, this is comfortably one of the best-reviewed titles this library has covered this year.

The launcher that wouldn't let go

What drags the score down isn't the game — it's what you have to go through to play it. Fifty-three of the 100 most-helpful negative reviews raise Ubisoft Connect directly, describing a mandatory third-party account and launcher required even for entirely single-player play. The specific consequences reviewers name are concrete and checkable: Steam Family Sharing doesn't work at all, the game requires an active internet connection to launch even on a fully offline device, and notifications like "you've earned Ubisoft Connect XP" interrupt play repeatedly. Thirty of the 100 negative reviews specifically describe Steam Deck problems, and — unlike almost every other launch-related complaint this session has traced back to a single dated event — these continue appearing well past 2024, into 2025 and 2026, even after Steam awarded the game its "Deck Verified" badge in December 2024. A handful of reviewers additionally describe genuine data loss: one 183-vote review reports losing progress twice to save-desynchronisation, and Ubisoft did respond quickly with two dedicated hotfixes in the first two weeks after launch, but the underlying architecture — an always-online requirement layered onto a single-player game — remains the structural cause reviewers keep naming years later.

A great game Ubisoft chose not to finish

The most striking pattern in this review's research isn't a Steam complaint at all. Multiple high-vote positive reviews — 840, 317, 223, 176, 138, and more — independently reference the same real-world event: Ubisoft disbanding the development team behind The Lost Crown and declining to greenlight a sequel. This review checked that claim against games press rather than relying on Steam reviews alone, and it's confirmed: the BBC and several other outlets reported that Ubisoft told Ubisoft Montpellier's team, within weeks of a January 2024 launch that reportedly sold around 300,000 units in its first two weeks, that a pitched sequel and further expansions were refused, and the team was reassigned. Ubisoft's own statement described other projects that would "benefit from their expertise." The community's read on this, visible throughout the positive review sample, is consistent and pointed: a critically loved game that struggled commercially, in part because of exactly the friction this review's negative sample documents — a mandatory third-party launcher and a period of Epic Games Store exclusivity before the Steam release, both of which several reviewers argue suppressed the audience the game's quality deserved.

Final Verdict

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a genuinely excellent metroidvania, and this review's research found remarkably little to disagree with in that assessment — the complaints that exist are almost entirely about Ubisoft's own launcher requirements rather than anything Ubisoft Montpellier built. That's real and worth scoring honestly: a mandatory always-online third-party account for a single-player game is a legitimate, ongoing cost to buyers, particularly on Steam Deck, and it's part of why a game this well-regarded still carries real friction in its reviews years later. Buy it for one of the best action-platformers in recent memory, go in aware of the Ubisoft Connect requirement, and know that the team who made it no longer exists in the form that made it — a detail that adds a real note of sadness to an otherwise easy recommendation.