Conan Exiles

Conan Exiles is often slow and arduous, but even after 70 hours – 40 since launch – the idea of returning to the Exiled Lands still holds some allure. Crafting is largely a tedious grind, especially the higher up you get in the crafting tiers, and it's surprising that in a world about brutal combat, Conan Exiles falls flat there. However, the beautifully realized world is a joy to explore and it nails the atmosphere of the source material.

This hardcore survival sim is too dense for its own good.

If Ark and Rust are the flaccid alpha males of survival gaming, Conan is the cocksure challenger angling for an advantage.

Broad in shoulder, wide in scope, rough around the edges. Nevertheless, an enjoyably meaty survival game.

While some of Conan Exiles has rubbed off a bit for me thanks to friction with its more cumbersome aspects, it remains a genuinely engrossing experience to play... if you can find a spot in the queue.

Conan Exiles is a surprisingly good open world survival game that does a good job of blending genre mechanics with the harsh world of Conan the Barbarian. It's seriously addictive stuff despite general jankiness and a strange obsession with nudity, but the multiplayer is the real highlight. If you're looking for something new to play with your friends for a bit, look no further.

I played the PC version of Conan Exiles for the purposes of this review. From the perspective of a fairly demanding PC nerd, I found the game to be more than adequate. While it has lots of the classic rough edges common to survival games, it can be outright beautiful at times. I encountered no performance issues on my machine during play and the game has all the graphical options and settings you'd expect from a competent PC release. The game works well with high resolutions, ultrawide configurations, and high refresh rates. I found it to be very playable with the Xbox One S controller, though I used a mouse and keyboard for the majority of my time. The game runs on Unreal Engine 4, so users can expect the usual strong point or quirks common to games that license this popular engine.

Despite its issues and flaunts, I couldn't keep myself away from Conan Exiles. Its meaty combat, huge map and nicely paced objectives made the game morish, even when I got lost (in the menus, not the jungles).

Despite its issues, Conan Exiles is actually an enjoyable survival game that can easily suck hours away from your life before you even realize it.

If you are not prepared to put the hours in, this is a title that is better left alone.