N-Gage is Nokia’s premier mobile gaming experience so the games there are supposed to be exceptional as far as mobile games go. Unfortunately Prince of Persia does not really fall into what I would call a premier gaming experience.

Starting at the very beginning, it is indeed a Prince of Persia game. But a game that I swear was on the NES because that’s about the quality of the graphics even on my N81 8GB. Granted the phone isn’t the strongest player in the market and doesn’t have some features that the newer ones do like hardware graphics acceleration, but the game should still look good. It’s a traditional 2D side-scrolling action game as one would expect from the franchise and it does have some parallax scrolling. But the graphics are gritty, jagged and seriously unimpressive to say the least. Additionally there’s some stuff floating around each level that serves no purpose. By floating around I mean it is in the foreground, laid over the playing screen sort of like lights from a disco ball.

The combat animations are choppy and inaccurate. In order to beat some minor bosses you need to struggle against them and then best them via strength. When you do they are thrown back. The animation then, after the enemy is on the ground, has the prince kick out as if that is how they were thrown to the ground.

The sound reminds me of the Doom Era in fact I think some of the death sounds for some enemies ARE Doom sounds. The music is quite good though so I can’t really understand why the sound effects are so basic and sparse and bland, that’s what I would call them, bland.

The story? Ugh, don’t even get me started. You’re of course the Prince and you’re on your own quest. Along the way you meet Elika who needs to, big surprise, save the world. She enlists you to help her in your quest so that she will then help you in yours. Personally I would have said no and just gone on my way. The addition of this character adds absolutely nothing to the game except for some terribly flat dialog (you must read, no voices in this title) and some completely contrived levels just to fit in the ’second playable character.’ Elika can fly which means all of her levels require her to fly up somewhere, dodge some lame traps and step on a switch so that the Prince can continue. She also plays the standard damsel in distress as some creatures are attempting to capture her and take her back to her father.

Blase? No doubt. The storyline smacks of every cliche ever used in a game, film or book and I ended up just skipping past the cut scenes and dialogs because they really added nothing to the game. Speaking of adding nothing to the game there are also these lame dragon mount flying levels which do nothing for the game. I think they only serve to break up the monotony that is the platform action of the title and they don’t even do that all that well because they’re far from interesting.

Overall I had expected a far better title for the Nokia N-Gage premier mobile gaming experience and instead I found it to just be a rehash of the old with some failed attempts to break up the action and include a storyline. While the gameplay is interesting for about five minutes I wouldn’t suggest anyone pick up this title.