I've been playing some old Dynamix and Microprose adventures, but also gave that 2008 PoP game a try. I'm glad I could pick it up extremely cheap, because early impressions are very bad.
About the only good thing about the game so far is that it looks really good, despite no graphical settings being present in the game menu, what's up with that? Combat is a dull Fable-like button mashing affair without any risk of dying because of the magical chick that saves your butt if you screw up. There's also constantly prompts on the screen to push buttons during combat and the like, very distracting and annoying.
Platforming is ok, but the camera is pretty terrible, making it hard to know where to go next and turning the whole thing into a trial-and-error affair more often than not although again, the magical chick saves your butt if you fall to your doom. For some reason, for all her omnipotent-ness she still needs to jump on the Prince's back for some reason, which again is pretty distracting.
Also, having to collect 60 orbs of light after killing a boss in order to continue... real fun.
Perhaps the Prince calling out to Farah in the beginning of the game, and Farah turning out to be a donkey rather than the nubile Princess of old, is symptomatic of the game as a whole compared to its predecessors of the same company.