Naked and famous
Muscling in on the survival scene, Conan Exiles? You and whose Arnie?
We’re all grown-ups here, and this isn’t the first survival game to render male and female genitalia in detail. However it is, as far as I know, the only survival sim in which you tweak the size of your character’s personal areas while they hang nailed to a cross, their breasts or scrotum flapping in the breeze as if being teased by a vacuum cleaner. Half-Life had the train. Oblivion had the sewer exit. Conan Exiles has this. This is a game about surviving in a hostile world by manipulating its resources until you live in relative comfort. Unlike most in the survival space, it’s also a game with a fantasy RPG lying beyond the first dozen or so hours spent fashioning tools. An RPG of silly boss fights and quests for artefacts, and one true to Robert E. Howard’s ’30s pulp fiction adventures, the 1982 Schwarzenegger movie, and the 2004 tabletop RPG. The Conan licence ought to give Funcom’s survival game the kind of worldbuilding that the genre generally struggles with, and it’s true to an extent that you feel a greater sense of place from the setting and mechanics than you might in, say, Ark. Keen to flex that tabletop muscle too, effects such as crippling and bleeding color the combat, often a little too much, while the world map is pure early 20th century exotica, recreating the imagination of a time before planet Earth shrank to a knowable dot.
That map is Conan Exiles’s strongest asset, even surpassing the genital physics. It’s the dangling carrot (the world map, I mean) that keeps you mining, because you want the iron armor to explore the Unnamed City and vanquish its skeletal horrors. Even late in the game, there are still far-flung regions hosting phenomena you’ve yet to see. Journeying beyond the deserts and into meadows and snowdrifts with their own native clans and beasties is its own sense of accomplishment, crafting tree be damned.
About that, actually: Conan Exiles has a hell of a crafting tree. You could be forgiven for thinking you’ve accidentally loaded up The Sims and its every expansion, such is the devotion to interior decor items and unique armor sets later in the game. It’s a grind to get to those upper echelons, but the transitions between phases are snappy enough. You can work your way up from wood tools through stone to iron and steel in one determined evening, as long as the server isn’t heavily populated or full of dicks.
Which, of course, it will be. For those averse to human contact, it almost functions as a solo survival RPG thanks to a series of boss fights that lend a sense of structure, but it makes for an opaque and lonely one in the absence of formal quests and a scarcity of NPCs. As is so often the case, the apex of Conan Exiles is found on a private server with a few devoted friends who won’t destroy your every accomplishment. In public server land, offline raids are generally forbidden so you can (usually) disconnect with the knowledge that your pitiful hut will be safe, but I encountered several servers where the dominant clan was so big that it could operate how it pleased. However, I’ve also seen solo players grind until they could summon an avatar, a god made flesh, and run amok across a large clan’s base. Conan Exiles is good like that.
Despite 15 months in Early Access there are rough edges all over
Rough edges
What it isn’t good at is coming across like a finished product. Despite 15 months in Early Access there are rough edges all over, including audio sync issues, enemy AI that sometimes ignores players, and suspect slope traversal. Fighting anybody on a 10% gradient or above involves a lot of swinging impotently at the air under an enemy’s feet. Given the combat animations and weapon feedback aren’t where you’d hope them to be even when Exiles is functioning correctly, it doesn’t work up much goodwill to look past any glitches. But nor are these shortcomings enough to write the game off: Its capacity to throw new areas at you while maintaining epic clan war sagas is something to be celebrated.