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| Xbox 360 Box Art |
Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the
sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And onto this, Conan,
destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It
is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell
you of the days of high adventure!
Well, from the look of it, we got a Conan the Barbarian game on our hands. Sadly, this is based on the original stories of author Robert E. Howard and not so much on the 1982 film and its 1984 sequel, so Conan is not voiced to sound anything similar to the Lord of Austrians (and is, in fact, voiced by Ron Perlman). However, don’t worry, because there is still plenty of what is best in life - crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentation of their women are all on the agenda for our trip into an age undreamed of. Sadly, so are repetitive button mashing, a right joystick that makes you do a ridiculous tuck and roll in whatever direction you pick instead of controlling the camera like the right joystick is supposed to do in third person games, and a fixed camera angle that makes it difficult in some quarters to see enemies coming at you.
Regardless, let’s look into the story. Conan, future governor of California, is
seeking treasure when he accidentally releases an evil wizard from a mystic prison. In gratitude, the wizard beats the crap out
of Conan and tears off pieces of his armor, cursing them and scattering
them…elsewhere. Praying to Crom for revenge (and if he doesn’t listen, then to
Hell with him), Conan journeys across the land to seek the lost pieces of his
armor. Along the way, he comes into
league with a pirate captain named A’Kanna and her crew in order to save the
world from “the Black Death”.
As I said before, it’s a button mashing hack n’ slash fest
of the highest caliber, but we shouldn’t really expect anything less from this
mythos. You have the heavy attacks and
the light attacks and the red balls of experience that get beaten out of
enemies let you learn almighty combos to do further hacking and slashing of
enemies. That’s par for the course in
this kind of game, though.
Despite the repetitive button mashing to chain slash after
slice after chop, the kills are beautifully visceral to outshine even the
fantastic blood splatter physics of Dragon
Age – though, ironically, the hyper-gory world of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories seems from this game to be
far more realistic when it comes to blood loss – though after chopping through
wave after wave of enemies, one could be forgiven for seeing little difference.
And that brings up another complaint I have about this game
– the camera. Listen, Nihilistic
Software and THQ, in a third-person game the right stick controls the movement
of the camera. It doesn’t make me do a ridiculous tuck and roll away or towards
enemies. I’m Conan, damn it! I’m the
BAMF that took on Thulsa Doom and burned down his freaking stone temple!
And even from a less than sarcastic standpoint, I can’t
react to something I can’t perceive before it hits. This is a problem with fixed camera games for
me. But at least Conan doesn’t have the Resident
Evil problem of me having to change my movement with the control stick due
to how the camera is fixed. But this
still makes it where enemies just out of view can easily get a few shots in
because I can’t see them telegraphing their attacks. Some people would call this attempting to
make the game more difficult. I call it stupidity, but whatever.
Now don’t get me wrong, this game is fine (camera issues
aside), but it doesn’t do anything new.
And it certainly did not bring great riches to THQ, for whom this game
was a failure. It received a little bit
of praise, which is fair, but it’s certainly nothing too wonderful or
fantastically noteworthy. And so, having
no further concern…
Conan is now available
from THQ and Nihilistic Software on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
This review is based
on the Xbox 360 review.
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