The Rogue Prince of Persia

From Dead Cells' caretakers to a new Prince

Evil Empire earned its reputation the hard way: Motion Twin handed the studio Dead Cells after its own launch, and Evil Empire spent years turning it into one of the most respected, continuously-supported roguelites on the market through free updates, paid expansions and constant balance work. The Rogue Prince of Persia is their first major original project built on that same foundation — fast, acrobatic 2D movement and combat, procedurally structured runs, permadeath with meta-progression between attempts — applied to a new story starring a nameless Prince trying to undo a betrayal that's already cost Persia its king. It launched into Early Access on 27 May 2024, deliberately delayed a week from its original date specifically to avoid landing in the same week as Hades II's own Early Access debut, and spent 15 months in that state before a full 1.0 release on 20 August 2025 completed the story with a final biome and a final boss, King Nogai. Steam's reception has stayed remarkably consistent across that entire span: Very Positive throughout, 89.1% across roughly 2,350 lifetime reviews, and recent sentiment actually higher at 92%.

The movement earns its comparisons on its own terms

Where the game most clearly justifies its pedigree is in how it feels to move. Parkour and combat aren't separate systems bolted together — wall-runs, dashes and acrobatic traversal chain directly into attacks and evasion in a way multiple reviewers specifically single out as the game's best quality, distinct from simply copying Dead Cells' feel wholesale. It's the kind of tight, responsive design that comes from a studio that has spent years living inside exactly this kind of moment-to-moment combat, and it shows in ways that are hard to fake. Performance backs this up too: reviewers across a range of hardware report the game running comfortably, a genuinely welcome contrast to several other 2024 releases whose technical problems dominate their own review pages.

The variety complaint that outlasted Early Access

What keeps a meaningful slice of the review base from fully recommending the game is one specific, recurring criticism, and its persistence is the notable part: it shows up in reviews from the very first weeks of Early Access in 2024, and it still shows up in reviews posted well after the completed 1.0 release in 2025. Weapons, several detailed reviewers say, don't differentiate themselves enough from each other in actual play — a roguelite's core promise is that different runs should feel meaningfully different depending on what you find, and multiple reviews describe encountering the same handful of enemy compositions and room layouts regardless of how many runs they attempt. One recent, detailed review posted after 1.0 puts it directly: identical enemies, no varied compositions, predictable pacing, weapons that barely differ, and medallions that mostly provide flat stat boosts rather than build-altering choices. That's not a launch-week complaint that quietly resolved — it's a two-year throughline, and it's specific enough, and consistent enough across that whole span, to be treated as a real design limitation rather than a phase the game grew out of.

The unavoidable comparison compounds this. Because Evil Empire's reputation is built entirely on Dead Cells, reviewers naturally measure this game against it, and several do so explicitly and unfavourably — describing The Rogue Prince of Persia as competent but derivative, hitting familiar beats without finding its own distinct identity within them. It's a harder standard than most new IPs face, but it's the standard this specific studio's back catalogue invites, and the variety complaints above are exactly where that comparison bites hardest.

A story that finally got to finish itself

It's worth crediting what the 1.0 update actually did, since Early Access reviews and post-launch reviews aren't always describing the same game. Players who tried The Rogue Prince of Persia in its first months were explicitly playing an unfinished story with no ending in sight — several 2024 reviews say as much directly, framing their thumbs-down as a "wait for 1.0" placeholder rather than a final verdict. The August 2025 release resolved that specific gap: a new final biome, a final boss in King Nogai, and a story that actually concludes rather than trailing off at whatever the current content ceiling happened to be. That's a meaningfully different, more complete product than the one several of the harsher early reviews were reacting to, even though the variety complaints detailed above persisted through the transition largely unchanged. Judging the finished game fairly means crediting Evil Empire for following through on the ending while being honest that finishing the story didn't fix the specific mechanical repetition many players had already flagged more than a year earlier.

Verdict

The Rogue Prince of Persia is a well-made, well-supported roguelite from a studio that genuinely knows this genre, and its movement and combat flow earn every bit of praise reviewers give them. Where it falls short of its own pedigree is variety — a specific, repeated complaint about weapons, enemies and run composition that shows up consistently from Early Access through to well after its completed 1.0 release, rather than a rough patch the game grew out of. At its current discounted price, it's an easy recommendation for players drawn to the movement and combat feel specifically. Players hoping for Dead Cells-level build variety should adjust expectations accordingly, since that's exactly where this game's own long-term reviewers keep landing the same verdict.