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Late Night with Conan the Barbarian By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman Conan can only be described in one way... It’s like a girl that treats you undeservingly well while dating, she’ll: bring you a cold beer, do a sexy dance for you, pay for her own meals, and even buy you a cool comic she saw at the store for no reason whatsoever. However, when you’ve finally committed to this girl, you’ll find things quickly changing for the worse and that she was only doing this to get you to stay. Conan for the Xbox 360 is just that, a deceptive bitch.
I’m not going to lie, I still like Conan like I like my ex. When I think about the game, I tend to only remember the fun things I did with the Cimmerian such as: chopping off people’s limbs with his massive blade and punching lions and monkeys in the face. However, whenever I’m forced to spend time with Conan, I look at him with a bit of resent. Conan is a 3-D action adventure hack and slash game. The combat system is heavily combo based and the combos are pretty varied and visually interesting so the game doesn’t feel like some Dynasty Warriors clone. In fact, the game plays a lot like the 3-D Ninja Gaidens, in that your success is dependent on timing and variety of attacks. The combo system is very advanced for a “button masher” as you can cancel a move at near anytime with another move leading to some devastating combos. The combat really makes this game in that it felt like I wasn’t playing a video game anymore and was actually directing my own Conan movie/comic.
The music is truly epic. It helps with the immersion making you feel like you are a barbarian from the iron age. In fact, one of the reasons I now want to goto the Video Games Live concert is to hear this soundtrack done with a live orchestra and choir. The sound effects are nice, but a little intrusive and repetitive. While I understand there's only so many different “clangs” clashing swords can make, they could have given Conan more than 3 things to say when he slays a foe. Though as the game progresses, you can literally see the game fall apart right before your eyes. What starts off as a very easy to pick up hack and slash game; you'll find it turning into a repetitive combofest where you must press a long convoluted sequence of buttons with near perfect timing. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, I did have to stop drinking to actually beat certain parts (and that's not very fun for me). The challenge goes from easy for infants to damn near impossible for veteran gamers in the blink of an eye. The last levels were so flooded with random goons and baddies that I started to get bored and discouraged from the challenge. Another problem is how the game begins to break down graphically in the last half. You'll start to notice little things, your combo meter lagging pretty bad or won't even show the number of hits you made at all (it'll just show the combo meter's background flashing). Then the bigger glitches will start to surface, Conan will stall mid combo or the camera will do this unintentional Matrix style slowdown when you're struck. It came to the point where I had to pop in different game just to make sure this was Conan's problem and not the 360's.
Speaking about the camera, it sometimes get atrocious. If you could pick worse camera angles in a game that depends heavily on platforming and combat in confined spaces, I'd really like to see you try. Worse yet, is the lack of consistency in the cinematography; one minute Conan is running towards the edge of the stairs, the next minute the camera changes and pressing up sends Conan to the depths of Hell. This could have been remedied by making the R stick a camera control and making the dodge function based on pressing block and the L stick.
I must say, had I bought this game in November for the $60 asking price, I'd have been pissed off. However, getting it for $17.99 on the way home from the bar allowed me to forgive the game for some of its problems. In fact, it's pretty enjoyable in brief stints. Actually, I think I may try to beat that impossible joke of a last boss right now.
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