I started playing Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands recently. Or rather, I tried to start playing it.

After having to adjust my video card settings to even get the menu screen to animate smoothly, I discovered my Xbox 360 controller wasn’t being recognized, even after plugging it in several times to get the game to recognize it.

Then I went into the options menus only to find that the game has no video options. You can’t even adjust the screen resolution. The game runs at whatever your monitor’s default resolution happens to be.

Here’s where I spent most of my time with ‘Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands’.

When I finally started the game, the initial story cut-scene was rife with egregious screen-tearing. When I got to the actual game, the screen-tearing was present there also.

I did some research online and found that the screen-tearing is a common problem with The Forgotten Sands, even in the console versions, but adjusting my V-sync in my GeForce control panel might fix the problem. I adjusted my V-sync options several times, with little success. The screen-tearing wasn’t as present during gameplay, but you could still see it during the initial cut-scene.

The Forgotten Sands is supposed to be the fourth installment in the Sands of Time series, but from the little time I spent with it, I saw they changed the character model for the Prince. My best guess as to why was to make him look more like Jake Gyllenhaal from the Prince of Persia movie that released in 2010, the same year The Forgotten Sands released, and I suspect is the reason why The Forgotten Sands was even made in the first place: as a movie tie-in. Jake Gyllenhaal isn’t Persian and doesn’t look Persian, and the Prince in the game doesn’t look that Persian either. Not anymore.

Here’s a cool picture I found of the Prince fighting enemies in ‘Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands’. I never made it this far.

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is a poorly optimized game. If you can get it to run on your rig, it might be worth your time – but even after spending three hours trying to get it run in a playable form, and getting the game to recognize my controller, the screen tearing was too much to take. I haven’t had this much trouble with a PC game since Far Cry 2 (another Ubisoft game) erased my save file…three times.

Shame on Ubisoft for releasing a game in this state, especially a Prince of Persia game whose previous entries in this series were all outstanding. After how superb the Sands of Time trilogy was, there really was no reason to make The Forgotten Sands years later other than as a cash-grab movie tie-in.

I’m glad I only paid two dollars for this one. Play the Sands of Time trilogy if you haven’t yet, but avoid The Forgotten Sands.