Review: Age of Conan - Hyborian Adventures.

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Whoo boy how to start on this game? How about the phrase "Suckered in"
That's really what I was thinking after the 1st few weeks after buying this game.



Okay lets start with the standard overview:

Age of Conan is a game made by a company called Fun Com starting everyone's favourite barbarian Conan. Conan the Grumpy Barbarian basically is under attack from the usual "dark forces" that you see in these types of fantasy games and you play as the "chosen one" however being the chosen one in an MMO game surrounded by several other "chosen ones" it's kinda dulled down a bit.

The game starts with the standard character creation where you get to pick from 3 races. The egyptian like Stygians, the Greek like Aquilonians and the Viking like Cimmerians. There's a difference between classes depending on what race you pick but it pretty much boils down to your standard Warrior, Rogue, Mage and Healer affair. Your character starts off as an escaped slave on an island and without spoiling the plot (for people who care about such things) you pretty much you spend the 1st 20 levels on that island going through the storyline before being thrown into the game proper.

Now Personally I feel that while this tutorial island was pretty well done you are basically suckered in by spending so much time there. I had a blast running through that island and was greatly dissapointed once I left.

Let me just elaborate here a bit...

I pretty much bought this game when it 1st came out and really it felt like a game that should of just been hitting beta let alone being released to the masses. Once I had left the island I was confronted with memory leaks, bugs, bad monster and player balancing issues, graphical glitches and streaches of levels with just nothing to do but grind my way through mobs.


Graphics wise this game is one of the pretties I've seen in an MMO there really is some awsome views and great effects such as when you cut someone's head off in moves that are like Mortal Kombat Fatalities. However with the game's mature lables I found some real interesting/strange scenes of people including:

- A Drunk Pirate peeing into the sea.
- A snake that had eaten a person with their hand still waving out of it's mouth.

All in all I found the game fun but the crippling ammount of bugs and problems made me quit after the 1st month.

Oh and the final twist of the knife where Funcom was trying to get players back, I literally got an e-mail threatening to delete my characters if I didn't re-subscribe. Well if I didn't want to play anymore then I certainly won't if my characters are effectivly dead.