Review: Conan Exiles

To be honest, I don’t play survival games very often. I have dabbled in Minecraft survival, but that is just not my jam at all. I don’t think I ever played Ark before, although I have seen it. So, for me, Conan Exiles was a fresh experience.

Obviously I grew up with the Schwarzenegger movie and the attempt of a Reboot with Jason Mamoa (which features one of my favourite scenes in cinema, both gruesome and awesome at the same time).

For a game, it has a great character creation system, and gives you a lot of options to craft your own favourite avatar. I can only attest for the single-player experience as I hate to lose resources already in single player that I do not care at all for the multiplayer aspect of the game.
I can attest that I spend hours crafting my little home in the wilderness, as you will need to see that your character is fed, clothed and all the fun things in a survival game.

I chose for the more tactical option of building inside a rock formation so that I didn’t have to build everything all at once, but still had shelter when I needed to get away from danger. Gradually, my base became my own and I build a small hut and started to overcome the nature of the game and got better at survival. Yes, I died, but I learned and adapted and quickly made my own home. It’s fun. It takes time to learn, but once you get the hang of it, you can spend hours just gathering resources in a tranquil manner, obviously fighting for survival with the creatures of the land, and growing more and more powerful as you do so.

I love that they put it into the land of Conan of the novels and made it so that you can craft your own character and your own narrative in this world, although there is lore to be found, you have to explore for it. Nothing is fed to you, although the menu has recipes that you can craft compared to games like … where you don’t get recipes and basically have to combine things to see if they would stick or not or have to have google at hand at all times and it’s really emersion breaking in those games, but not in this one.

I really love that they don’t hold your hand, but it never feels overly unfair or punishing. You can get the upperhand on the nature of the game and it never feels as if you can never win. Once you get at the stage where you start to get the upperhand and don’t have to have fear that much, is the moment you really can start to explore and when the real fun begins in this game. That’s when the real flow starts to set in and you start to lose a sense of time within the game. Before you know it you have sunk in hours upon hours into the game and when you only thought you were going to play 30 minutes, you have spent 4 hours in game. These occassions are rare for me, and it’s fun to experience them here.