In Conan Exiles, you have been left to die in a barren wasteland.  Near death, you are visited by none other than the legendary Conan the Barbarian, who rescues you from your crucifix and sends you off to build your own civilisation in this land of savages and monsters.  The main aim of Exiles is to build up a civilisation – making your own fortresses, cities, Armies, slaves – to survive the harsh landscape that FunCom has created from the material of Robert E Howard’s mythology.  Upgrading your fortress will allow it to withstand hordes of Savages or even the armies of other players, hoping to siege your walls, kill your people, and reap your spoils.

Pre-Gameplay

So off the bat, the first thing you’ll come into contact with, obviously, is the start menu.  A loud orchestric collection of drums and trumpets plays, hypes you up for the barbaric lands of Sand and Slaughter.   You are given a choice for Singleplayer, in which you can survive as a lone wolf and become an even stronger King (with no allies can be no betrayal), or Multiplayer, allowing you and your friends to band together and rule over the Exiled Lands as an alliance.  I prefer Singleplayer/PvE over multiplayer because my internet speed is too bad for PvP, and I would just die anytime someone decided to sneak up on me (which happens a lot).  It would be great to play with friends (if I had any), and I’m sure that the performance drop during combat will be fixed soon (the game is still in Early-Access territory), however I prefer to be able to experience the game how it was supposed to be played rather than being killed over and over again (just think what that can do to a man’s mentality).  The next thing you’ll notice after you’ve picked you’re playstyle (if you are on Multiplayer) is that it takes quite a while to load up all the servers, and once they do, there are hundreds of empty servers, essentially meaning that there is no point in playing Multiplayer if there aren’t multi-players.  Then, once you have picked your server of choice, or even selected “Singleplayer”, then your hype train of barbaric fun suddenly comes to…a…screeching…halt.  The Loading screens.  Oh god, the loading screens.  I’ve probably spent so much time on loading screens that I’ll be asked to be its new-born child’s godfather.  I can make a Five Minute Meal quicker than these loading times (5 minutes to be exact, if anyone was interested).  Goldberg versus Kevin Owens at WWE Fastlane was quicker than these loading times.  What I’m trying to say is: It takes a while for the games to actually load up.  This is made worse by the chance that if you wonder what’s wrong with game and randomly click your mouse, only to find that the game has actually frozen and just crashes.  Being fare, the load times are bearable, but the crashes are too frequent.

Core Gameplay

When you finally get into the game you’ll immediately notice the graphics.  This game – its design of the barren landscape, the NPCs, the ruined buildings, the small pieces of paradise – is beautiful.  FunCom has perfectly captured the detail in each biome, the individual grass flakes or the sand dunes, all of it look great.  The water could be more reflective, but keep in mind this is an early stage version of the game, and there is no doubt that they are constantly working on making this game look even more gorgeous.  Even on medium, which I was on to help the game run faster, it still looked great.

You can create and customise your own characters, unfortunately there isn’t a lot of choice when it comes to things like hair or face as there are few to choose from, however there is a face morphing feature and I’m sure FunCom will add more as the game develops.

Also you can choose your penis size and breast size, and this game features extreme nudity, there is just male genitalia everywhere.

This game works like most, almost all, survival games.  You have to collect resources, craft tools, collect more resources, kill some strange turtle looking monsters and creepy testicle things (the Imps, I’m not talking about slaughter bunch of men’s knee-knaws), build a small hut, collect resources, and here’s where it becomes interesting, expand your hut, then collect MORE resources.  This is then where the game actually begins to become more unique than other survival games.  You can then go about recruiting (or enslaving) other Exiles, and begin to forge a community and build a bigger base.  Once you’ve done this and you feel A. your fortress is strong enough to withstand sieges from enemy players (or NPCs) and B.  You can confidently take on bigger, and badder enemies, then you can build altars and summon “avatars”:  huge titanic god-like creatures that you can control to lay waste to your enemies, however they happen to be a bitch to summon.

Without going into too much detail, or I’ll be writing longer than it takes to actually summon an Avatar; you have to build a three tier altar, each piece of which takes quite a while, and a lot of resources to build, then you have to physically summon your god of choice (you can choose from Mitra; a gigantic bronze colossus – picture a huge Gladiator statue that moves, Set; An enormous snake – picture…an enormous snake, or Yog, An immense eldritch horror – picture Cthulhu, more to come).  When summoning your god a huge beacon will appear that basically draws enemies to you in Singleplayer, or reveals our location to everyone in Multiplayer.  This means that you MUST make sure that either you can handle hordes of bad guys, or have some friends close by.  If you die during the summoning then everything is lost, the God disappears, the ceremony ends, and you have to start building the altar again.

Combat

The combat in this game is what you would expect.  Rapidly click your mouse to slash at enemies and dismember them.  It’s nothing new, so it is pretty easy to pick up and master.  In terms of enemies, this ranges from normal creatures like crocodiles or rhinos, to strange beasts like Imps (those testicle monsters I was talking about before), to the Crazy-giant boss monsters like Undead Dragons or Giant Spiders (of course it had to be Giant Spiders).  Then of course there are also tons of fellow exiles and savages to worry about, but don’t worry if you run low on health there’s like a shit ton of rabbits and deer to elk, not to mention the handfuls of Bugs you can eat too.  Basically, everything in this game either wants to kill you, or needs to be killed to survive.   There are these things called Shalebacks, which are Turtle-Gorilla looking things that are supposed to be neutral and non-hostile (unless you attack them), but don’t worry about being confused because they’ll just attack you anyway.

Special Features

The game features Admin controls (if you are the host of the server), which means you can customise the world’s day and night cycles, and also control how fast you lose points in each of your survival stats (Hunger, thirst, energy etc).  Much like games like minecraft, you can also “cheat” and spawn in items and NPCs and also become a God and go around slaughtering people as an Invincible Killing Machine, which I am prone to doing.

Difficulty

Overall, this game was difficult on my first try, but as I kept playing the game became easier and easier.  I’m sure if I had friends to play it with, it would be even better because working together is fun.

Glitches

Unfortunately, due to this game being very early access, it comes with a few bugs and glitches.  Nothing major apart from the Loading screens freezing and performance rate dropping during battle, however I did notice a few which became very annoying.  The first main one was that everything except deer and rabbits attacked me, even the neutral enemies.  This meant that I was constantly being attacked and in a game where you have to learn how to survive a barren landscape, “barren” being the wrong word to describe it as it is full of living organisms (all of which want to kill you).  I wasn’t able to befriend any bad guys because they would always attack me.  Another annoying glitch is that even when you save your spawn point, using a bedroll or a bed, sometimes you won’t always respawn at that point.

Future Updates

• Siege Warfare: Players can attack each other’s settlements with powerful war machines, such as siege towers or trebuchets, and fling rotting corpses over the walls of their enemies to spread pestilence in their streets.
• The Purge: Hordes of NPC warriors will sweep down into the Exiles Lands and attack player settlements. Players must ready their defenses against this brutal attack, but can also go on the offensive and capture new thralls and strong gear.
• Mounts: You will be able to enjoy mounted combat on horses and capturing camels, rhinos or even elephants to be used for pack animals or crushing your opponents walls. Mounted combat will also make its way to Conan Exiles.
• Sorcery: Embrace the dark corruption of magic to summon demons or raise the undead to create an army of skeletons. Magic in the world of Conan is more than shooting fireballs out of your hands: it’s dark, terrible, and twisted.
• Settlement System: Create a living city, where you command your thralls to guard, patrol, craft, gather or trade based on your own schedules. Build roads, set up schedules for your thralls, and breathe life into your settlement.
• Highland Biome: An all new area expanding the existing map into the highlands, with new creatures, armours, religions and a temperature system. Explore vast forests and scale tall mountains in this rugged, weather-beaten part of Hyboria.

Pros

• Beautiful, great framerate
• Great variety in Creatures
• Easy to pick up and become familiar with
• Better than most survival games (e.g. Ark – it actually works and runs well, and Rust – it has a great sense of fantasy and creativity – and No Man’s Sky – Don’t even get me started), and most Early-Access games
• Cool choice of Playstyles (Purist, Roleplay, Experimental etc)
• The developers have clearly allowed players to quickly progress through the survival aspects to be able to work on the main focus of the game which is to build up civilisations.
• Character customisation is fun, needs more features though (no facial hair)
• Combat is easy to learn
• Endowment control
• Great immersive score

Cons

• Annoying amount of patches
• Spawn point doesn’t always save even when it says it does
• non-hostile creatures than should only attack you when you attack them attack you regardless
• Loading screen freezes frequently
• Loads of empty servers, making multiplayer pointless (however bear in mind that this is Early-Access)
• Long load up times
• Cheating is easy, though takes the fun out of it
• Fuck giant spiders.
• The map is always the same, no procedural generation.
• I have no friends.

Conclusion

Conan Exiles is a promising Hyborian Survival game.  It shows signs that the developers are heading the right direction with this, but it just needs a little bit more.  It can feel repetitive at times, and if you’re not playing with friends, it soon becomes a bore and there becomes little point to continuing.  I would love to see more features for Character Customisation, NPC Interaction (companionship building or Quest givers), or even more items to find.  This game has so much to offer, it just doesn’t have it yet.  I hope the developers see this and know that what they have, for an early-access game, is really good, and it’s close to possibly being the best Multiplayer Survival games in the market.  If it gets more –say – RPG elements, and more story and reason-to-play, then it could be great