Akward control response mar the presentation of this otherwise mediocre albeit somewhat interesting action rpg.
A bit.
The other reviewer was mostly correct. The blocky, polygonal environment coupled with the erratic camera controls AND erratic character controls is very annoying. Camera is stopped from circling around you if there is an obstacle - the engine doesn't conveniently clip the wall for you like good cameras should. The control problems are largely movement-related, and I believe are tied to the camera - if you don't move the camera around so much, movement is decent. You still get that annoying moving-in-a-different-direction thing, there is no cure but to force the camera to recalibrate by moving the view (right analogue) before attempting to move Conan (left analogue).
The good: it's Conan. Hell, I even cracked a joke about the guy looking somewhat like Schwarzenegger, and then I remembered that he DID play Conan in the movies. D'oh. Cutscenes are voiced over by a somewhat over-the-top narrator, and does manage to convey a bit of the epic feeling you get from the movies. After a while, despite the flaws, I found myself wanting to get to the end of the story. I don't claim that it is THAT engaging - this is Conan we're talking about - but it isn't entirely a braindead cliched disaster either.
The bad: flaws everywhere, which makes them very annoying. The graphics manage to appear as if they were using a beta engine. Clipping, seeing-behind-textures, you name it, it's there - you will eventually see all the effects of a poorly-optimised graphics engine. The environments themselves aren't half bad though, sufficient to give you that "you are there" feeling, although you will still see crude polygonal shapes here and there. Very few special lighting effects that I recall - Conan only uses weapons, and the rare few magicusers you fight have visually unimpressive magic attacks.
Controls: poor. This was, and still is, my main gripe. Often you'd move the analogue stick in one direction and Conan will keep moving in another direction, until you recenter/move the camera, OR temporarily change direction. Collision-detection is fairly poor as well, quite unforgiveable in close-up third-person perspective games since you can SEE mistakes like feet not quite touching the ground or body parts passing through objects. There are a few instances where a misstep will make you fall off a cliff / down a shaft / etc which means instant death, and you don't get to fight death champions to negate this because it isn't a heroic death so you will be forced to reload.
Worst of all is that Conan is simply sluggish - I know he's supposed to be a big bulky guy, but well-exercised big guys move fluidly, thanks to all that practise. It's what differentiates brutes like Conan from plain simple fat potato couches. He does not seem to have a sidestep move, and there was this one fight where a spellcaster had an attack which would drop you on your back. Imagine trying to corner him in a squarish room. Yes, it was a bloody nightmare, and I only got him because for some reason he got distracted by another enemy and stopped blasting me away. It took 20 minutes, which is effing long when you consider that most enemies fall within 3-4 combos (