Product Reviews

The easiest way to describe Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is that it's like World of Warcraft, but bloodier. Call this a lazy description if you will, but in many ways it's an accurate one. Where once Age of Conan promised to be a very different sort of online role-playing game, in practice it sticks closely to the familiar quest-and-level formula.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with this approach, and if you want accessibility from your online worlds but sniff at the twee-ness of Warcraft, Conan's grimier approach to fantasy should be just your thing. This is not a Tolkein-esque world of shiny spires and teary dwarves, but rather one of mud and blood, where magic is unwieldy and crude and where the non-human races will kill you in a second. The experience points and looting mechanics may be very familiar, but the setting is refreshingly grown-up compared with the usual fare.

Combat is the focus here, while trading and crafting are given the lightest

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of treatments. Age of Conan is very much about big men beating up other big men (although female and magic characters are also available). Rather than the click-and-wait auto-attack fighting system of Conan's peers, here you're constantly pressing directional buttons to alter your angle of attack. It certainly ups the sense of involvement, as each bloody blow is a direct result of your actions rather than the usual invisible dice roll, but some will find the sustained rhythm of button-hammering tiresome.

The situation with dialogue is similar. The idea is that you engage in conversations by choosing from a list of responses rather than mutely accepting whatever a computer-controlled character asks of you. In practice, it can often mean reading a lot of uninteresting dialogue. Conan places a lot more emphasis on storyline than most MMOs, at least in its first 20 levels. This is engaging enough during those early levels, where voice acting accompanies the text, but after that the voices disappear and you're left with a lot of text to click through.

This leaves the standard 'kill x of x' quests and plenty of brutal player-versus-player action. Beneath its high-end graphics (you'll need a meaty PC and plenty of disk space), Conan is a very shallow game. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. With launch bugs being ironed out at a rate of knots, it is shaping up to be a particularly polished game that focuses expertly on the more visceral elements of fantasy worlds. It may stick doggedly to a formula, but it does so slickly enough to succeed.