Sit down while I tell you the story of Simba, a young tiger cub. As a lone wanderer set forth on a long treacherous path north into the unknown, Simba’s parents Mufasa and Whatshername attacked the man out of fear for their young cub, but proved no match for the man’s not so sturdy club. The man left the young Simba to mourn his parents’ passing and continued on his journey. What seems to be a lifetime later, Simba finally snuck out of nowhere to kill the adventurer while he was within sight of his goal. I know, this kind of sounds similar to the plot of The Lion King, but this is the story I made up to go along Conan Exiles, which has no real narrative to speak of, so I felt the need to share the one I made up as I went along.

The title has been updated to a full release meaning it’s no longer Early Access; you can review my initial thoughts here. While a number of the issues have been improved or even outright fixed, the game is still far from perfect. The visuals have been greatly improved with far more details and textures being used, although the graphics still have a great deal of bugs associated with them. Certain enemies or objects will regularly tear and pop through other environments, and items will display the incorrect texture all together – this happens quite often with the large scorpions I found a few hours into my time with the full release. While some look simply outstanding, you’ll notice that upon death some will take on the textures from other creatures. This becomes more of an issue when there are more enemies on the screen, with some of the largest enemies often disappearing in the middle of a battle, or sometimes knocking the player through the ground into a never-ending fall. At their best, the creatures and enemies do appear to be on par with those featured in Skyrim, but at their worst they kind of look similar to those in Morrowind running on a barebones PC.

As I stated earlier, there isn’t much of a narrative to the game outside of some minor tasks given at the opening such as eat, drink, and essentially survive as long as possible within the game world. I chose to start a new character and just work my way north looking for something of interest. While you will occasionally come across a friendly NPC, they rarely have anything noteworthy to say or do aside from offer a minor XP bump for killing them. Some would say trying to survive is enough gameplay for them, but I prefer a bit more of a story from a game, even if it’s a minimal one.

In the pre-release, I found the survival mechanics to be a bit brutal, which is still the case when playing by default settings. Now when playing solo or in co-op, you can set up your game to suit your skill or lack thereof, which works when playing PvE, but on the PvP end of the spectrum it makes an unforgiving game even more difficult. After jumping into games to only be killed repeatedly after spawning I opted to play solo. This made the experience more enjoyable, but also took much of the challenge away. Sadly, once you’ve started, you cannot tweak these settings, which would have made finding a proper middle ground more attainable.

The game world is huge and ripe for exploring, with new locals being added to your map as you come across them, giving the player the option to highlight specific areas on the map using icons or names of their choosing. Sadly, there is no quick travel or option to make the markers appear on the in-game HUD, making navigation tricky and cumbersome. Adding insult to injury, your only option for respawning at death is the starting point of the game, unless you are lucky enough to setup a bed to rest in or found a structure at some point in your journey. The game fails to tell you this in any meaningful way, which means your first death will likely be a devastating one.

Logic says that just building stuff more frequently would help this, right? Well, this mechanic is a chore, as building is far from intuitive. You’ll be given an idea of the size of the piece you’ll be working with similar to Fallout 4; however, nine times out of ten, you won’t be able to place anything for some unexplained reason. Most of the other mechanics featured in the game are just as cumbersome, if not worse. Combat is a crapshoot if your attacks will even land, with many creatures or enemies being invincible while others die by you simply looking at them. The same can be said for crafting, as the game seems to ignore your full inventory of items needed and requires you to exit and re-enter the menu repeatedly to get the option of creating the item. Naturally, this is all done while being open to attack from lingering enemies. Since weapons and items can rarely be looted or found, crafting is a huge part of the game and will be required to keep up on your armor and weapons.

With so many great RPGs on the market that offer a wealth of content and level of polish Conan Exiles will likely never achieve, it is hard to recommend this title. With its presentation and poor mechanics hidden behind some slick trailers, this is nothing more than a free-to-play game hiding behind a retail price point.

4 out of 10

Pros

• Huge Open World
• Some Interesting Creatures
• Wealth of Server Options

Cons

• Lack of Direction
• Poor Respawn/Traversal
• Visual Bugs
• Unbalanced PvP
• Not Much to Do

Conan Exiles was developed and published by Funcom. The game was released on May 8th, 2018 for PS4, XB1 and PC for $49.99 ($39.99 on PC). The game was provided for us to cover on X1. If you’d like to see more of Conan Exiles, check out the official site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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