One of the complaints leveled against Ubisoft's recent Prince of Persia re-imagining is that it was too easy. Which is nearly as subjective and useless a complaint as saying it's "fun", but at least those people can always go back to playing Ninja Gaiden, Braid, PixelJunk Eden, and Call of Duty 4 on "veteran" level, which adds the ability for enemies to teleport grenades directly into your character's pocket.

But I'm guessing Ubisoft planned this all along. They make the basic game for schmoes like me who didn't mind cruising through some forgiving acrobatics and animation without seeing QTE button indicators flashing on the screen. Dragon's Lair for Dummies. Then, for the harder-core gamers who kvetched that it wasn't challenging enough, they sell them another difficulty level!

Ubisoft describes the upcoming downloadable content, titled Prince of Persia: Epilogue, as follows:

- New Region: The Underground Palace - A corrupted underground palace from which the Prince and Elika need to escape in a new epic journey.
- New Power: Energize - Reconstruct destroyed areas of the environment to create a path and rush through it before it vanishes.
- New high pace: The new trap challenge - The Prince and Elika will face more cunning foes, cleverer traps and level design, adding more to the difficulty level in over 3 hours of gameplay.
- New Attack: Sprinting Clash - A duel move that lets you or the enemy trigger a sprint attack, charging towards each other, clashing your weapons fiercely.

Part of the reason I'm not terribly interested in a new tougher level tacked onto the outside of the game is because it's already a complete package, with interwoven levels that reward backtracking and exploration. Annexing a new unrelated area misses a lot of the appeal of Prince of Persia. I'm less interested in all this after associate producer Jamal Rguigui elaborates for IGN.

Elika's new power "Energize" is a travel based power that adds a timing challenge. This power allows Elika for a short period of time to materialize an area of the environment that was previously destroyed. Therefore, the Prince and Elika will be able to access areas previously impossible to reach without this power.

In other words, hurry across the bridge before it vanishes.

Since we wanted everything to feel more intense, we added the "Sprinting Clash" making both the Prince and his foes more dangerous. When at a distance from the enemy, the player can mash the Acrobatic button to sprint. This leads to an opportunity for the player to "stun" the attacker and therefore take the offensive. These make for even more intense combat sequences and with a little creativity, the player can create some rather memorable moments in duels.

You lost me at the word "mash".

For the main game, players could check the timing of the first and second trap of the pattern and most of the time, successfully go through the sequence. Now in the DLC, the number of traps for one sequence will be higher and players will need to look at the third, fourth, and further traps to understand the pattern and find the right timing. There will be more thinking involved to succeed a sequence of acrobatics, and there will be traps in almost every acrobatic sequence.

In other words, considerably more retries before you get past certain areas.No thanks all around.

Finally, come on, IGN. Give a guy a break. Did you really have to embarrass Rguigui by cutting and pasting in this bit?

The new area takes place mostly in huge various rooms. It is reminiscent of the mine of the Moria. It reflects a really dark ambiance and claustrophobic feelings.

Epilogue will be available February 26th. Pricing hasn't been announced yet.