A challenging platform. A good romp through the world of Conan.
Don't you hate it when you're looting some ancient ruins and you accidentally release an imprisoned sorcerer and he takes your armor and turns it into brutal monsters, AND THEN sends a plague across the land? Yeah, it totally ruins your day.
I have to admit to being more impressed by Conan than I was expecting. I went into this title expecting the combat to become quickly repetitive, and was pleasantly surprised when this turned out to not be the case. Between being able to pick up objects and throw them, grapple enemies, use a variety of spears, halberds, axes, swords, dual wielding, shield combat, tossing people into bonfires and impaling them on stakes, there is a variety of death at your disposal as Conan the Barbarian sweeps his way across the land. The combos are easy to pull off, which was a great feature for someone who is as useless at fighting games as I am. The one major drawback that I kept running into is the load time. Your demise is followed by up to a 45 second pause as the game loads back up, which strikes me as absurd when you're returning to the same area or the same battle, rather than several screens back. Maybe that's just me.
The graphics are terrific, although many of the areas feel more claustrophobic than they need to be as you're herded along the linear path. The good thing about this is that it makes it easy to find most of the game's "secrets." Blood and gore and severed limbs add terrific character detail. Conan walks a little funny, but his movement during combat is very fluid, although I did get a bit annoyed when the action would hit "slow mode" for apparently no reason. It's not like you could follow up with a combo during this time, so it was just irritating.
While the voice acting isn't anything to write home about, it is pretty funny when Conan starts muttering "Crom" everytime something goes wrong. The music is aggressive and keeps up with the pace of the game nicely.
Not much replay value here. Once you've gone through it once, that's pretty much it. You can increase the difficulty, but the game is decently challenging even on Medium mode. I finished the game in a little over ten hours, so this may be more of a rental title than a keeper. If you're in for some savage barbarian action though, this is the title for you!