The makers of Dead Cells offer their take on the Prince Of Persia, with a new 2D roguelite platformer that has just enough new ideas to be worth a look.
Originally released in 2018, Dead Cells is a 2D Metroidvania that plays like a hybrid of Hollow Knight, Castlevania, and Dark Souls. Famed for a peerless dedication to updates, which brought not only new weapons, levels and characters, but prodigious crossovers, developer Motion Twin eventually handed off creation of new updates to Evil Empire, who continued releasing fresh tranches of DLC until last year.
If you’re wondering what would happen if Evil Twin got to create their own project from scratch, your wait is over, because that’s what The Rogue Prince Of Persia is. It’s also a 2D Metroidvania, and underneath its ancient Persian trappings shares much of its DNA with Dead Cells. It’s a clever use of Ubisoft’s IP, given Prince Of Persia’s roots as a 2D game, and the way its 2003 reboot, The Sands Of Time, treated every death as a mistake in relating the story – telling you ‘No, no, no, that’s not how it happened’, as it deposited you back at the last checkpoint.
The concept lends itself nicely to the eternal time loop of a roguelite, which in this case brings you back to a desert oasis after you die, ready to head back into the fray and try again to save Persia. Beginning each run, you grab a weapon and a tool, which is how the game differentiates between the offensive implements the Prince carries in his left and right hands. You need to complete attacks with your left hand melee weapon to fill an energy bar that lets you use the other hand’s bows and oscillating saw blades.
In addition to that, the Prince finds magical medallions that buff healing, attacks and the speed with which you earn energy to deploy tools, their advantages stacking, sometimes in useful ways. So if one medallion spreads sticky resin on the ground that slows enemies, you could combine that with another that scores critical hits on enemies stuck in resin.
As is standard in roguelites, your selection of weapons and medallions varies with each run, as do the levels you explore. Fortunately, like Dead Cells, while each area is procedurally generated, it’s not completely random. Instead, it’s effectively an assembly of handmade sections, which are then put together to form a level. This prevents some of the less interesting design choices that can come with leaving everything to chance.
When you slay enemies, they leave behind soul cinders, the currency used to unlock new weapons, tools, and medallions. In an interesting risk vs. reward structure, you can bank your collected cinders at the start of each level or choose to keep them. The latter earns a small bonus, with the downside that if you die before finishing the level they’ll all be lost.
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Moment to moment, the best thing about the game is the pinpoint precision of controlling the Prince. Running, jumping, and attacking feel so fully under your control that you’ll rarely come across a death, or even accidental wounding, that doesn’t feel completely your fault. While much of that is an awful lot like Dead Cells, there are a few departures that help keep things feeling at least a bit different.
The most significant of those changes is the absence of parrying, which was foundational in Dead Cells. You’ll also find the Prince can do brief wall runs – naturally only if there’s a wall in the background – instead of double jumps and performs a vaulting dash instead of Dead Cells’ classic dodge roll. The wall runs especially, make traversal satisfyingly characterful, with its use swiftly becoming muscle memory.
You’ll also find skill trees that weren’t present in Dead Cells. They’re small and discrete, with more becoming available as you level up. You can reset spent points at any time, encouraging experimentation with varying builds, and helping you target specific goals for a run. Will this one be about winning a boss fight, or earning as many soul cinders as possible? The skill trees make it easy to adapt your approach depending on desired outcomes.
Like Hades, you’ll discover the Rogue Prince’s story unfurling as you make progress, with new scripted events emerging, and the friends you recruit for your hub oasis helping advance the plot as you unlock new bosses and parts of the map. It helps build a sense of momentum beyond the roguelite staples of unlocking buffs and equipment.
The other departures from its inspiration are mostly cosmetic. With an animation and art style oddly reminiscent of 1960s Looney Tunes, it’s immediately less colourful and fantastical than Dead Cells. That means its biomes can feel a little less differentiated, and its enemies less wild looking. It’s not drab so much as less extroverted in its colour schemes.
Music is likely to be similarly divisive, with a darker more EDM feel that manages to combine plenty of Middle Eastern influence. Dead Cells’ score was an absolute classic, and almost impossible to follow up, so this complete departure is probably sensible, but we’d be lying if we said we didn’t miss the glorious ear worms that accompanied so many of Dead Cells’ levels.
The Rogue Prince Of Persia does have ideas of its own: you can kick rocks to stun enemies or remove their shields, there are foggy sections where the smoke only dissipates when everyone’s dead, and some levels now start with a mad dash to reach a wizard before he drags a child into an evil looking rift. There are also neat call backs to previous Princes Of Persia games, like swinging blades, hopping between flag poles, and wobbly disappearing floor panels that date right back to the original 1989 Apple II game.
The overwhelming impression though, is that this is a Dead Cells-like. Given the multiple influences already clearly visible in Dead Cells, that can make it feel like a copy of a copy, and while its kinetic action and pin sharp responsiveness remain excellent, it’s hard to shake the sense that we’ve seen all this before, and in some cases done slightly better.
The extraordinary evolution of Dead Cells over the six years that it was supported suggest that if the Rogue Prince charts a similar course, it may well gain considerable depth, variety, and beauty. As it is, it’s a solid start, if one that’s so manifestly similar to the game that inspired it that unflattering comparisons are impossible to ignore.
The Rogue Prince Of Persia review summary
In Short: A well made and fun 2D Metroidvania game that despite having a sprinkling of new ideas, looks, plays, and behaves like a clone of Dead Cells.
Pros: Highly responsive controls; tight combat with a wide range of weapons, buffs, and perks. Good use of Ubisoft’s venerable IP and mastering wall running is an art form in its own right.
Cons: Not as colourful as Dead Cells and biomes aren’t as different from one another. Animation, music, and art style are fairly polarising.
Score: 7/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Evil Empire
Release Date: 20th August 2025 (Switch TBC)
Age Rating: 12
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