A prime cut of Slavjank marinated in a special sauce of baffling design decisions only Cauldron could concoct. It displays a clear adoration for Howard's works, at least from a story and art design standpoint, and its score is fantastic. Those elements made it at least a little endearing, but the rest of the rough patches made it a struggle.

This is an action game with combat not too dissimilar from the Lord of the Rings games EA had released around the time: you've got several combos you perform with various different button strings which can be unlocked and upgraded with experience gained from defeating enemies. Unfortunately, like those games, you usually end up spamming the most powerful combos once you've unlocked them because it'd just be stupid not to. It's doubly an issue in this game, as the enemies are so fucking cheap, especially when facing three or more at once, that thinning their ranks takes the highest priority, and the cheesiest combo is the only real way to accomplish it. They can block your strikes mid-combo, arbitrarily break combos after a few hits, and if you make even the slightest error, can stunlock you into oblivion. You can switch between axes, maces and greatswords to alleviate the first two issues with certain enemies, but generally speaking there's no real reason to do so unless you put together the Atlantean sword at the very end of the game and thus completely trivialize combat from then on. The third one has no real solution, and it's the biggest place where the faithfulness to the source material falls apart. Remember that part in Red Nails when Conan gets decimated by four Xotalancas because they were so cartoonishly relentless? Or in People of the Black Circle when the Seers kept spamming projectiles and running away as soon as he got close to them? Or when the giant snake in The Scarlet Citadel had a million hit points and would take a fucking century to allow him three seconds of opportunity for offense? Of course not. It never happened because Conan don't play that bullshit. Maybe he would, though, if he were affected by some of the wonkiest controls and camera I've ever experienced.

Conan's movement is beyond fucked. He seems to move independently yet simultaneously dependently of the camera. If you turn it or if it turns itself, you have to stop dead in your tracks to course correct. Otherwise, he'll keep moving in whatever direction you were holding beforehand regardless of what new direction you're pushing in. This can lead to some very frustrating combat sequences, especially in tight corridors that the game loves to put you in, because your input doesn't immediately correlate with where you'll actually go half the time and you can easily get cornered. There are even times where you can get stuck in the running animation on geometry even if you're not pressing a direction, seemingly because of the camera's position. There's a reason those Lord of the Rings games and the likes of Devil May Cry stuck to very basic if not mostly static camera angles, and its specifically to avoid this kind of problem. I guess they were too busy cooking up that masterpiece Chaser to play those games enough to understand that.

I think there's a solid game hidden underneath all the scars this one exhibits. Had it been given more time and budget, it probably could have been a hit love letter to one of the most influential sword and sorcery properties ever. As it stands, though, it's really nothing more than a curiosity for hardened Conan and/or Robert E. Howard fans that are looking for an interactive tale in the Hyborian Age, one where you actually get to play as Conan and isn't another generic open world survival game.