Conan Exiles Reviews
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.
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.
Half-broken and needlessly obscure, but if you have the patience this challenging survival game can be extremely satisfying – and it'll be even better when it's finished.
This hardcore survival sim is too dense for its own good.
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.
This is a game with a huge map and with almost infinite content. Funcom has brought Conan the Barbarian's world to a very complete game and improving what we saw in the early access, even though it has some flaws to be fixed.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
As you play more of Conan Exiles and access higher tier items, it becomes more and more clear that there was serious potential here. The survival aspects of the game are fun, provided survival is your thing, and it brings some new ideas and features to the table. The thrall system in particular is interesting, but ultimately fails in its execution. Considering its price, I can't help but feel the package and its quality is a little lacking.
Conan Exiles feels like an unfinished game. A unique survival experience, full of potential, but also full of bugs and broken elements. It may become one of the best in its genre, if Funcom continues working on it.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
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.
Conan Exiles brings you in a violent world, full of background stories and dangerous places, but still feels crippled due to technical flaws, despite the time passed in early access on Steam.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Funcom has created the largest Conan video game to date. This title has a successful commitment to survival and free construction in a large and rich environment. There are other mechanics, also good, such as combats with Souls-type action, or the search for sanctuaries and divine invocations to gain power and presence in these wild lands. The technical issues are the usual ones of early access games, such as framerate, the AI or the animations.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
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.
Conan Exiles excels in its sense of place, and has an absorbing and complex crafting system that will keep you coming back, but there is no escaping that it is a deeply flawed game that still feels a little unfinished.
With Conan Exiles, you're either in or you're out. There's a hardcore fanbase out there that loves this game, but there's an exceptionally high learning and enjoyment curve that will keep more casual players from getting invested enough to explore its deepest content or even wade around much in the shallow end. On a quality level, the game simply doesn't feel like it made it out of early access even though this is the full release. Add that the game is hardly optimized for controller and living room TV play, and this is a title that is hard to recommend outright. That said, for fans of survival games, there's a very intriguing game layered underneath walls, road bumps, and cliffs that need to be scaled to get there. And it's easy to lose hours of time simply figuring out how to build a house, or, you know, put on pants, but a lot of that can be chalked up to poor and barbaric design.
Even in its current state, Conan Exiles is addictive and will keep you coming back for more. The structured milestone system eases you in.
Conan Exiles is one of the most disappointing games I have played this generation. I have not experienced another game on PlayStation 4 as broken as Exiles. It is hard to believe that a game could be released for purchase in such bad condition. In another genre, the bugs in Exiles might be fun or amusing. In a survival game, they are crippling. Gamers deserve, and should demand, better.
These positives tend to be forgotten though, and can be completely eclipsed by the game's main pitfalls. The frame rate is unacceptable at times, which then affects the already subpar combat. These issues, combined with the numerous crashes, took me out of the experience more than a few times. Sadly, these negatives are nigh impossible to overlook.
In this particular version of the Conan the barbarian, the world was too dull and unpolished to lure me in. The crafting system – while confusing – is unquestionably deep, which enabled me to build some cool things in an environment that offered no true variety or immersion.
Conan Exiles shows some flaws and missing contents that make it still weak and incomplete. The potential of the game, however, is still good.
Review in Italian | Read full review