As camp as Christmas
There’s a nice pace and balance to the game and as opponent’s become increasingly tougher, you unlock more powerful moves giving you more choice in battle. You can’t just button bash your way through - on anything higher than normal difficulty anyway - so the game does provide a decent challenge in which you’ll need to time your moves and blocks in order to defeat any enemy.Conan is fairly limited in terms of weapons, but the selection of blades do come in all shapes and sizes. Some cause heavy damage, but are cumbersome to lift, whereas others may have a good reach, ideal for keeping lions at bay. There’s enough variety in there to ensure that you’ll pick up weapons dropped by the enemy and eventually work out that some are more effective than others in certain circumstances.
In addition, you can use the environment to good effect, picking up boulders to throw at enemies, lighting torches and then setting encampments on fire, using wooden spikes to impale enemies, or crushing foes by pushing pillars with your brute strength. The combat is fairly deep, without being overly complicated and allows you the freedom to tackle enemies in a variety of interesting ways.
Click for larger image
Click for larger imageThe only downside to the combat sequences is the AI of opponents, who can occasionally be seen standing around you in a group and not making any attempt to attack, but the problem doesn’t surface enough to take any enjoyment out of the game. Strangely though, Conan does seem to suffer from occasional frame-rate issues and when there are dozens of enemies on screen at one time, you’ll sporadically experience slowdown. Once again, this doesn’t really ruin the flow of the game, but it is something that you’ll become aware of during larger fight sequences.
One of the highlights of Conan are the boss sequences, which are cinematic in production and span across multiple stages. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the first major boss battle ,against the Sand Serpent, really gets that adrenaline pumping and draws you right into the action. There’s nothing spectacular about the actual boss fights as they all involve the same tried and trusted method of working out when to attack and defend, but they’ve been pieced together really well and are certainly worth battling through the levels to experience.