Conan Exiles

The most accessible and enjoyable survival MMO in years, Conan Exiles is a remarkable triumph and the best of its kind on PS4.

Quotation forthcoming.

A survival game that embraces adventure. [Issue#201, p.88]

Conan Exiles is a game where you make your own experience. Much like Minecraft, Exiles will have you exploring, creating, and building, while also providing a fully immersive game set in the world of Conan the Barbarian. Most of the time that will equal out to fun.

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).

Given its dark and mature fantasy theme, Conan Exiles is a surprisingly accessible online survival experience. Even under the most generous conditions the game will still challenge you as you make your mark on the world, and players who fancy themselves as survival game experts will find plenty to pit their abilities against. No matter your level of experience, Conan Exiles is a survival experience that is very much worth investing in.

Conan Exiles feels like an unfinished game. A unique survival experience, full of potential, but also full of bugs and broken elements. It may develop into one of the best in its genre if Funcom continues working on it.

The game has achieved a good balance between functionality and quality.

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, which are also good, such as combat 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 endemic to early access games, such as framerate, the AI and animations.

Do not expect an evident or strong storyline in the first number of hours, or to be spoon-fed how to play the game through tutorials or directions. Prepare to die in the beginning, a lot. And most of all, prepare to explore a beautiful and diverse landscape with limitless things to discover and create, and to have a lot of fun doing it.

Despite its horrific initial learning curve, we managed to delve into Conan Exiles to find a super capable survival experience, and we found ourselves investing way more hours than we initially thought we would. With some more polishing and a friendlier entry point for users new to the genre, this Funcom game could become something much much better.

Conan Exiles has the potential to be one of the best survival games out there. The game is already amazingly fun to play, but suffers from too many technical difficulties to reach that potential.

Even though some of its major aspects, like the battle system and the tiresome grinding, are keeping it from being great, Conan Exiles is a promising and unique survival game that -with the proper attention from the developer- could soon become a must-have for enthusiasts of the genre.

Conan Exiles is enjoyable enough, but it does reveal some fundamental weaknesses in the survival genre; it’s not one that can be tuned effectively to storytelling, and that means that if you’re using a storytelling property, such as Conan, you’re going to need to exhibit a great deal over control to bring the necessary focus into the experience, and unfortunately the developers weren’t able to quite get there with Conan Exiles.

It’s a game of magnificent vistas and embarrassing glitches, epic ambitions and humdrum work. The world is vast and beautiful, yet filled with dumb animals and even dumber enemies. While never less than absorbing, it can be hideously annoying too.

In this game everything takes time. This is not a game that discounts and is not in the least meeting those who have never played a Survival. You will have to have a lot of patience, especially at the beginning. But all this changes in multiplayer.

Conan Exiles is a good survival game, though only for the most enthusiastic fans of the genre.

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.

Funcom has delivered an above-average open world survival game that lives up to the mythos created by Robert E Howard. It fits in perfectly with the rest of the lore. However, while it is a fun game, it lacks a lot of polish, but if you can look beyond the flawed exterior, Conan Exiles will deliver hours of enjoyment.

Conan Exiles is loaded with possibilities and danger. But the poor online performance and a long list of glitches are currently killing the game, which begs for fixes.

Conan Exile's gameplay is a lot of fun whether you're playing by yourself or with other people. It's also extremely addictive which makes the game worth your time. It provides a decent challenge with a lot of different features and the developer promises to incrementally add new content which is great news. The game could benefit from some optimization since the game suffers from considerable frame drops and other technical glitches which negatively affect your enjoyment.

Ultimately Conan Exiles is a slow paced game with no quick pay offs. It provides a sense of wonder with its locations and the things that populate them. There is danger in the persistent online world which adds to the need to log on often to keep an eye on things. If you are not prepared to put the hours in, this is a title that is better left alone.

Exiles tries to expand beyond the traditional Conan power fantasy, but has a frustrating lack of polish that affects any enjoyment. It's a missed opportunity. [Issue#150, p.89]

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.

When things click, Conan Exiles is a unique and moreish survival-RPG that does scratch a primal itch. Unfortunately, it’s also sadly mired by a multitude of bugs, framerate stutters, audio dropouts and some head-scratchingly confusing menu systems.

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.

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.

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.

A sloppily implemented PC port that ultimately should have stayed in early access longer to iron out the kinks.

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.