Conan

Thursday, 27 December 2007 00:00

Good old hack-n-slash games, whatever happened to them? I remember back in the day when a certain Mr Schwarzenegger were just a Hollywood n00b, yet starring in classics like Conan the Barbarian. Even back then, a videogame was made out of the film, albeit, not to the same magnitude as the Conan game I'm reviewing.

I'd played the demo and knew what to expect and I wasn't disappointed, it's a really nice looking game with easy controls and solid characters. It's rated 18 and with so much gore, it's no wonder why, but that's not the only reason...

It starts off quite easy with some fairly basic enemies to get you into the swing of things .. literally, as you bash away at the buttons to slice and dice, you notice red 'runes' are absorbed by Conan. Green ones replenish health, but red ones give you experience points that can be used to learn new moves, making it not just a button bashing hack-n-slasher. Some moves have to be learnt in order to proceed and to unlock achievements and while the moves become harder to obtain due to needing more and more experience points, the achievements are pretty easily gotten.

For example (and another reason why the game is rated 18), rescuing your first topless maiden gets you the 'Noble Conan' achievement, some of them are easy, which is why they're only worth 10 points, but there are a few that only the hardcore will bother getting, such as beating the game in King Mode. Saying that though, the game does have some replayability appeal and you could probably go through it at least one more time.

A couple of little quibbles, one is when having to climb up big rock faces and having to move the stick and jump doesn't work sometimes, I kinda found that out at the Sand Dragon part, which got a trifle annoying. There are also points in the game where Conan would become in explicably stuck, as in, .Another thing I noticed was wrong shadows when holding a torch and being in barbarian times, torches consisted of fire on a stick. What I noticed was that when you walked up to something, the torch didn't cast a shadow, on anything. If an object already had a shadow, that's all it had, its original shadow and not one that should be cast when getting close with the torch.

Not major things, but just stuff I noticed. Something else I found the game needed, a better camera or even the ability to look around, there were times when I would have like to 'look before leaping', so to speak. Even if it was just using the shoulder buttons to move the viewing area around, it would have helped a little, but you sometimes had to go in areas blind and wait until something happened before getting a proper view of what was happening.

It's not a particularly difficult game and the puzzles are easy enough to suss out as it indicates where you need to climb, push or stand, you may need to throw a couple of boulders or set fire to stuff in order to go through, but it's hardly strenuous work. What can be hard work is mastering the moves, some moves can be mastered and each time you use that move, it goes up 5% until you reach 100%, then that move is mastered, obviously.

There are some oh so satisfying moves that need to be executed at just the right moment and can defeat the enemy in just that one move. Blue runes power up armour abilities which are useful when facing powerful enemies that can't be beaten with conventional methods. Turning them to stone or hailing fire can be more effective than trying to chop them up in a fight, sometimes you need an advantage to beat them.

As long as you remember to block and dodge, you'll go far in Conan, it's not just a totally mindless run and chop game, you do need to use some tactics now and then. It may seem a little repetitive, but only if you use the same moves over and over, there are at least more than 20 ways to defeat enemies and around 5 ways to decapitate them.

I found it to be a decent game that although might have a fairly linear storyline, is enjoyable to play and good for letting out a bit of angst as you go around lopping heads off and impaling people on spikes ... just as long as you remember it's only a videogame and not to be imitated. ;)

7.8