Initially fun, frustration quickly sets in as game progresses...
I like the whole idea. God of War / Devil May Cry - Esque gameplay with the ability to upgrade your character's abilities and special moves as you progress.
A lot of what this game does is fun, you get a lot of new moves, and it doesn't take much time to kick major ass, and save hot chicks. The fighting is fluid, but not as fluid as it could have been. You will run into fodder that allows you to use all of your cool new moves you've saved up for... and use them well.
The farther you get into the game, however, the less kick ass Conan is. Soon you're getting stunned by enemies left and right, and before you're allowed to roll out of it you've had half your life bar taken off.
I don't mind the difficulty, but I when I am playing a hack and slash I really want more enemies that are fodder with more space between the kick ass dudes. In which case, you get to showcase your badass moves, but at the same time from time to time putting more thought and strategy into the mix. The problem is, the "hard" guys break up your fluid fighting and instead of strategy, most likely you will just roll in attack, roll out to dodge, then roll in to attack again. This takes time. It's not fun really.... and it happens a lot.
I think the biggest place you will see this is in the final boss fight. I think I had to restart from checkpoints over 30 times in that fight. Taking about an hour to figure out the fight and then take out the boss. It's really frustrating; even when you know what to do it's heavily timing dependant... I felt like it was too much of a difficulty ramp up at the very end that you don't see in the rest of the game.
The other part is the final fight makes use of way too many contextual actions that are really easy to mess up (think phase 1 where you are button mashing as you take the boss down to 0% health) and accidently regenerate the health of the boss.
Finally, this game is for the most part clean of bugs, but there are some glaring ones you'll probably run into... I had this 100% crash anytime I tried to reload from the 2nd save point in the game on the beginning island. In any case, the game is worth a play, but it can be quite frustrating to finish this game through to the end.
I hope Nihilistic learns from this game's pluses and minuses and makes an even better sequel, if they choose to make one that is...