Prince of Persia: The Fallen King makes us want to pinch little cheeks

Ubisoft gave us the opportunity to get our hands on the Nintendo DS version of Prince of Persia: The Fallen King a few weeks back, and it was pretty surprising.

Not because the game was good or bad — I’ll withold my judgments until I get some more time with it. I was surprised because the game is controlled entirely using the stylus. Tapping the screen would move the adorable little super-deformed Prince, tapping would cause him to attack, tapping and holding would make him defend; tapping walls would make him hop on them. Tap, tap, tap … tap. 

There’s a lot of tapping going on in The Fallen King, which is an interesting choice for what essentially seemed like an action/puzzle/platformer. I played through the first area of the game, all the way up through a magical boss that kept dropping things on my head (I tapped furiously to best him, of course). Based on my short play session, I’m ambivalent about the title — not particularly thrilled about it, but it seems solid enough. 

The good news is that I felt the same way about the console version of Prince of Persia when I played it earlier this year. And, well, we saw how that turned out.