Once again, you're tasked with planning then traversing your route from one end of a room's often-precarious array of obstacles without plunging to your doom. It's an excellent return to that classic platform formula and as ever, it's the fluidity of movement that thrills most, the game's true joy coming from the satisfaction of chaining your moves into a single bout of flawless acrobatics. It might not have the sprawl of its predecessor but The Forgotten Sands delights in crafting intricate - and increasingly vertigo-inducing - levels that keeps tension high, with nothing but your own skill and judgement between you and certain death below. While The Forgotten Sands might be almost exclusively palace-bound this time, there's a surprising amount of diversity across the environments - offering up everything from dank cellars to beautiful rooftop gardens - and each delivers an increasingly challenging construction of obstacles to overcome. Some merely tax your acrobatic skills while others deliver more cerebral conundrums. The carefully-balanced mix keeps proceedings fresh, testing your reactions and brains equally as simple running and jumping gives way to elaborate contraptions necessitating all manner of switch-shifting and lever-pulling. What really makes The Forgotten Sands worth a look then is a return to the type of glorious head-scratching acrobatics we’ve not really seen since 2005’s Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. It might not do anything to push the franchise into new territory but there’s a ton of good, old fashioned free-running to sink your teeth into, with a neat reaction-based twist thanks to the new elemental abilities. While it's undoubtedly bland compared to Sands of Time (and uncomfortably familiar at times), it’s unhampered by unnecessary convolutions which plagued later series entries. True, the button-happy combat might be a step backward in many respects but the sheer quality and purity of the excellent, inventive platform action should be more than enough to keep fans happy.