Highlights

  • The Rogue Prince of Persia offers solid content for 15 hours of playtime, but could benefit from additional features and updates.
  • Steam Deck support for The Rogue Prince of Persia needs improvement to optimize gameplay experience and reach a wider audience.
  • While the game has diverse gameplay elements, focusing on developing a richer storyline should be a priority during early access.

There's still a lot of uncertainty surrounding the idea of early access, and there's good reason for that. While early access can be a great way for developers to get their product out as soon as possible and use fan feedback to make it a much better experience, it's been used in the past by companies as a way to release an unfinished product and get fans to pay a premium to play it. Thankfully, The Rogue Prince of Persia is far from a half-baked cash grab.

Being made by some of the same developers behind Dead Cells, The Rogue Prince of Persia is adopting a similar early access approach. In its current state, The Rogue Prince of Persia has a solid amount of content that should keep players engaged for at least 15 hours. But, of course, there's a lot that's missing from The Rogue Prince of Persia's current build, and while developer Evil Empire has promised to add new weapons, tools, upgrades, and more, the team might be better off prioritizing a specific set of features first.

Rogue Prince of Persia Series References
Related
The Rogue Prince of Persia's Past Series References Explained

The Rogue Prince of Persia is the latest in a franchise that's been going since the late 1980s, and it pays homage to the series' roots in a few ways.

Features The Rogue Prince of Persia Should Prioritize During Early Access

The Rogue Prince of Persia Needs Steam Deck Support

The Steam Deck continues to be one of the best handhelds on the market, and though it's more than capable of running 100-hour open-world epics, it's smaller games like The Rogue Prince of Persia that often end up being the most popular titles on the console. With each run in The Rogue Prince of Persia lasting only about an hour at maximum, it's the perfect title for shorter play sessions on the Steam Deck. However, The Rogue Prince of Persia's Steam Deck support isn't quite there yet.

Officially, The Rogue Prince of Persia's Steam page suggests that the game is "Unsupported" on the Steam Deck, meaning that Valve has not yet reviewed the game's performance. That being said, The Rogue Prince of Persia does run surprisingly well on the handheld, though it's far from perfect. Framerate drops are constant when players encounter larger groups of enemies and load into new biomes, and even when those drops aren't occurring, the game can struggle to get past 30fps. Players also don't have many graphical or performance settings available to them in the current Rogue Prince of Persia build. There's so much potential for The Rogue Prince of Persia to find a large audience on Steam Deck, but it's going to need to prioritize its support first.

The Rogue Prince of Persia Should Prioritize Story Content

For an early access game, The Rogue Prince of Persia actually has some really satisfying gameplay systems, and quite a bit of content for players to experiment with. There are a total of eight weapons in the game, along with six tools, and 30 Medallions, all of which allow the player to experiment with a few different playstyles. There are also quite a few different enemy types in Rogue Prince of Persia. While all of these gameplay features are presumably going to be added to and evolve over the course of Rogue Prince of Persia's early access period, they shouldn't actually be the developer's main focus.

Instead, it's Rogue Prince of Persia's story that needs more priority during this early access phase. There are currently only a handful of NPCs in Rogue Prince of Persia, and very few of them have much to say about the game's world, current events, or their relationship with the Prince. But the little that is there right now shows promise. Over the next few months, it'd be great to see more NPCs, more unique interactions, and more story-based objectives come to The Rogue Prince of Persia, as it's currently a little lacking in story incentives.