Conan Exiles never shies away from letting you know exactly what type of game that you’re in store for. In the opening cinematic you’re a dead man hanging on a cross in the desert as a shadowy figure approaches you. As the figure gets closer you find out that it’s Conan himself and he’s here to strip you from your cross and give you a second chance at life. His parting advice to you before he heads back off into the desert is simple – “Survive.”
From that point on that is your overlying task. Your character, which you create in a rather extensive character creator where you choose everything from gender to breast size, has free range of the map and can go in any direction looking to complete certain tasks in order to gain more supplies and a higher ranking. The one thing that sets Conan Exiles apart from other MMO and survival games is the very specific journey tasks that are there on your HUD to point you in the right direction. You’ll stumble upon other things to do and complete as you progress through the game, but following the journey hints they lay out for you will help to keep you on the right path.
At first it is simple tasks such as drinking water and eating food, but as you complete more of these easy assignments you’ll soon move up and find yourself looking to build a home and forge armor for yourself. Like any game in the genre you’ll find yourself collecting anything and everything that you can get your hands on in order to craft the things that you need to survive. As you become encumbered it’s important to have a home base complete with a home, bed roll, and box to store extra items so that you can return there when you need to drop off supplies or re-spawn when you die. Death is not permanent and you will return to either your bed, bedroll or desert depending on where you decide and you’ll wake up complete with whatever items you had on you when you died.
The world of Conan is exciting and truly feels alive. The prehistoric animals and people make for interesting battles and interactions and you’ll find yourself seeking them out more often than you will flee from them. When health gets low it’s important to find something to eat in order to regain your strength. Eggs and insects can be eaten as is, but meat will need to be cooked in order to avoid food poisoning and a slow painful death. You can even consume human flesh as long as it is cured properly in order to avoid food poisoning.
With these basics in mind you set out into the world trying to reach higher ranks and become more evolved and powerful. Crafting is the key to your survival. On consoles the menu system can be clunky and you’ll find yourself making a lot of mistakes before it starts to become familiar to you. This is especially true when it comes to cooking and adding crafted items to your wheel where you choose items on the fly in the world. With no real directions given to you and no tutorial to speak of outside of the journey and journal system, it will take a lot of trial and error in order for you to figure out crafting. Three separate crafting benches will be required in order to craft items. The furnace, tannery, and armors bench. You have to turn the hides and pelts into leather, the ironstone into iron bars, and then craft the armor at the table. Where some games just have you find items and bring them together, Exiles adds a step and makes crafting armor and other items fairly tedious. In time, you’ll get the hang of it, but there is a huge learning curve here. With the amount of items you’ll need in order to make things such as armor, you’ll find a lot of your time spent foraging and harvesting these items.
Exploring for items is never really a problem though because the world is rich and interesting. Each area that you explore is completely different with a very distinct habitat and animal life. Exploring jungle areas will lead to tigers and panthers while more prehistoric looking beasts roam the desert. Move a littler higher up the mountain summit and you’ll find villainous birds just waiting to rip off your limbs and peck you to death. You must do what you have to in order to survive, and what you must do is kill everything in your path.
Like any survival game you have the option to play solo or online. The online world feels much more alive than the solo world as you’ll come across other players and their dwellings while you explore the world. You can choose between PVE or PVP when playing online as well. During your solo adventure you feel much more alone and tasked with exploring a much more empty world. It isn’t a terrible experience, but it isn’t the most ideal way to play Conan Exiles. You’ll also need to create a different character for the online experience than you use in the solo game, which is kind of a bummer.
The technical aspect of the game is where it all falls apart. Unfortunately right off the bat the graphics look to be last gen at best. It’s not necessarily an ugly game, but it clearly looks dated. After some of the more recent games released on PS4 it’s hard to look at a game like Conan Exiles and think that this is the best they could do. Your characters hair especially just looks stiff and plastic even as it blows in the wind. The environments look pretty nice but, as mentioned before, dated. The glitches on the other hand are inexcusable. You’ll find yourself either stuck at times in a crab walk position, unable to execute a command that the button is mapped for or find yourself floating through the air Matrix style. While these can cause a good laugh or two as you play the game, they really break the experience and take what is a fun core game and make it something less than it could have been.
Recommendation: All of the technical issues and lack of polish take a fun experience that could have been a great game and really cause it to be a mediocre game overall. While there is fun to be had, it’s hard to justify the $50 price point when there are just better ways to spend your time and money. If MMO and Survival games are your bread and butter and really the only games you play, Conan Exiles is definitely a game you could have fun with for a while and with no monthly fee to play the game it has a slight advantage over some, but we’d recommend waiting for a drop in price.
*Conan Exiles was provided to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion*
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
