I was loving this game and singing it's praises and then it all changed.
The game starts out promising enough. It has a good cast of voice actors, the graphics are good, there are plenty of moves to learn and some good gruesome kills.
I never was a big fan of these type of games but I was a young fan of Conan once so I thought I'd give it a try and for the longest time I was having a lot of fun. I'm not even a fan of boss battles but I was really enjoying the boss battles in this game...they were actually kind of cool and fun.
Although Conan is a hack and slash game there are plenty of moves to learn. By the end I still hadn't freed them all up. They're not that hard to master but the downfall of the amount of moves this game offers is that it's hard to remember all the moves. And there is no way to know which moves you've mastered and which once you need to.
Another cool aspect is that you can pick up your enemies weapons and duel wield, or steal their shield and use it for yourself. You can pick up huge two handed weapons for a lot of power. So this is more than a two button game.
You later on learn songs of death that you can use on enemies with devastating effect. They're really good when out numbered but they are limited and have to be recharged.
My issues with the game are as follows though. The game is really linear...trust me you won't get lost or have a hard time trying to figure out where to go to next.
Jumping mechanics are really bad. At first more of annoyance than anything. In the earlier levels if you missed a jumped(which is far too easy to do) than you had to climb back up and just try the jump again. It became a real issue though later on, especially in the last level, when you missed a jump and fell to your death. It took several tries on almost every jump. The jumps were designed so that Conan just barely makes it everytime...you'll never make a leap by any huge margin. For me this was a big turn off for this game, but atleast the game is generous with checkpoints and I could almost retry right away.....but not always.
After a while the game starts to loose some excitement. You'll wish for a little more variety and your interest may start to wane.I found it hard, as much as I praised the game to my friends in the beginning, to play for extended periods.
Some other turn offs if your an achievement hunter or multi player lover is that there is no co-op or online multiplayer. I don't care about that but some might. The achievements are rather tedious though. eg do 500 grapple kills, the problem with the achievements is that to get them all you will have to play the game several times to do all the required different kills to get all the achievements. I would guess you'd have to play it atleast 3 times.
The worst part of the game though has to be the final boss. After enjoying all the previous boss batttles I was really disappointed to face such an extremely difficult boss. I'll admit I never beat him, I'll also admit I only tried once. I did feel better after watching on youtube and reading the comments there that a lot of people had problems and never beat him. To me this was disappointing. There is nothing worse than a game ruined by a terrible end boss....this is one such game.
I even had some desire to replay the game to go after some of the achievements but after the end boss I decided to never play the game again...such a shame. Boss battles should be challenging but they should also be fair, fun, and satisfying.
To sum it up the game was a disappointing end to what was a great start and in the end I can't quite bring myself to recommend it anymore...weeks ago I was trying to get all my friends to buy it for $3.99....I guess I was the only sucker.