Conan hits hard, looks nice beside babes, and gets to set lions on fire!
Your adventure through Hyboria has all the jumping, evading, manly activities such as lifting gates, and using boulders, but of course the game is focused on combat. You fight enemies with a handful of different weapons while interchanging between magic, blocks, parries, additional or alternative attacks, and throwing various objects. Sounds familiar, but it's not always just imitating per se. You grab any weapon you want from fallen enemies or the environment; there are two handed weapons for heavy but slow hits, sword and shield for handling multiple, differentiated enemies at once, and dual swords for fast but short range attacks. Dual swords can also be swapped with a torch to set a fool ablaze; each weapon class retains a few different looking weapons but they all behave the same. Conan can also hurl weapons like an Olympic Javelin Thrower, toss barrels and some soldiers with surprising force. Magic also helps, even if it's shoehorned in; out of the blue, I'd suddenly 'inherit' another spell.
Most of your enemies are soldiers or some sorta possessed crewmembers; but there's a small monster repertoire: wraiths, gorillamen, guardian statues, lions, and winged lizards. Monster variety grows with multi-stage boss battles, like a demonized elephant, massive squid, and some others. Enemies might be a bit dumb, but their rushing tactics still get the edge on you. I'll admit that enemies which were meant to impede your progress will overpower and make you realize that caution and interchanging tactics will be called for. Even with archers this is true; they'll just stand like a scarecrow but if you don't pull out the arrow, it'll bleed you out. Control occasionally feels wonky; jumping is sluggish, menus are oddly unwieldy, grabbing a 'specific' weapon can be fiddly, and once, the game became temperamental about my inputs.
It pushes decent amounts of polygons and the animations have good detailing to sell you on the decapitations, blood spurting, monsters' threatening size, and boobs. The textures… don't look too closely. Acting is reasonable, though Conan's portrayer seems misguided, effects are good, and the music is phenomenal. At 7-8 hours, Conan deserves your money… after a small price drop; it's good fun, can feel second-rate, and does some things better than even God of War.
7.0 / 10 GOOD
+It is still a decent romp even if it's a lot like God of War
+Some innovations like throwing objects and wielding fire are really enjoyable
+Enemies will make you have to rethink your strategies; button mashing only gets you so far
-Controls can feel sluggish or unwieldy
-It's about 2 hours too short at full purchase