Conan was made for the God of War treatment. While other games of this type resort to some sort of hocus-pocus to sell their protagonists' inhuman fighting prowess, Robert E. Howard's Cimmerian superman requires no such artifice. Raised amidst war and brutality in an inhospitable landscape, adeptly savaging throngs of lesser men is as second nature to the barbarian as checking e-mail is to us. Given this, it's just a little bit easier to forgive just how boldly Conan borrows from its predecessors. It's almost as if there were a part of us that's been waiting for this to happen. The resulting game nearly succeeds.

The action can get fairly technical, and at its best, it's mighty satisfying. You can arm Conan in a variety of ways: with a single one-handed weapon (and a shield, when you can find one); a dual-wielding setup; or with a heavy, two-handed weapon. Each of these has its own set of combos, and once you begin to unlock the higher-tier skills, they can get quite spectacular, as well as a challenging to pull off. The well-conceived fighting system allows you to unleash some pretty brutal stuff once you get the hang of things, such as relieve enemies of their weapons and assail them with their own steel, lop heads off clean with your shield, and engage in all manner of brutal pro-wrestling-style grapples. The results, as a rule, are quite graphic, and depending how well you do, you're rewarded with all manner of bonuses.

Yes, Conan borrows quite brazenly from games like God of War and Devil May Cry. The more effective you are at killing, the larger the number of colored runes that will burst out of your enemies when you dispatch them. Green ones restore your health, red ones can be used to purchase new combos, and blue ones fill the meter that enables your magic powers. You gain these powers piecemeal by collecting bits of Conan's scattered magical armor, guarded by the bosses that bookend the game's chapters. The first power you unlock allows you to turn your enemies to stone; the last one ruptures the fabric of reality itself, sucking your unfortunate foes into a void. As you'd expect, you use these abilities sparingly, as the casks containing the blue runes that power them aren't too common.

But although the game is built on a solid foundation, its levels aren't anywhere near as compelling as those of its predecessors. You essentially wade from one horde of enemies to the next, more mindful of your kill-chain count and the progression of your unlocked combos than of what's actually happening moment-to-moment. Not to say that the combat isn't challenging -- it can be quite unforgiving, in fact -- but the majority of the enemies are of the rank-and-file variety, which seriously undermines any sense of accomplishment you'd otherwise get from dispatching them. When the fights are at their most challenging, it's usually because the enemies are employing canned tactics that favor certain sorts of attacks over others. It can be a bit of a pain in the ass till you figure out which attack to spam, but once you do, it's usually simply a matter of repeating it ad nauseum with the correct timing. Ultimately, the act of unlocking new moves and witnessing their dazzling, grizzly animations proves more engaging than the combat itself.

Boss battles are similarly disappointing. They're typically lengthy, drawn-out affairs that certainly try hard to be epic set pieces, and in terms of grandeur of scale, they often succeed. All of the big ones are broken up into several phases, in between which you'll have to endure some truly tedious cinematic sequences that require you to hit certain button inputs with unforgiving precision. Failure to hit the right button at precisely the right moment means either death or (even worse) the boss spawning back to life with half health.

Just like the game's rank-and-file battles, the boss fights can usually be surmounted by simply exploiting a few cheap moves. The results are neither exciting to play nor watch. In one battle, you're fighting a flail-toting brute even burlier than Conan himself -- the only way that I was able to beat him was to roll around the ground, evading his attacks at a certain distance, and whittling down his health using a single rudimentary combo. Needless to say, it wasn't very gratifying. The final boss battle also bears mention: It's simply an unmitigated disaster. Without giving too much away, it alternates multiple times between two phases -- one that will likely cause repetitive-motion injury in the most dogged of players, and another that seems like it was built to make you fail. Factor in a series of timed-input sequences in between that feel sadistically rigged, and you have an overwhelming argument to put the game down before ever finishing it, scheming wizard and distressed damsel be damned. If the intent of this final battle was to prolong the game by two excruciating hours, then mission accomplished.

Fans of the mythology should be warned that the game's story doesn't compare very favorably to Howard's own Conan yarns, laden as they were with the author's challenging worldview, which, to modern sensibilities, could often be quite disturbing. Instead, Conan presents a fairly straightforward sword-and-sorcery tale, taking a few liberties with Howard's fragmented canon in order to enable some of the gameplay features the designers must have figured we'd expect from this kind of chop-chop-heavy action game. Notably, Conan probably wouldn't be caught dead using magic to rain meteors on his enemies, let alone clad himself in a wizard's armor to begin with. Indeed, such observable instances of "magic" run a bit contrary to Howard's world. But frankly, it's hard to take issue with these sorts of deviations if they're utilized in service of the game experience.

My main gripe is in how damned urbane the Cimmerian sounds. Voiced by Ron Perlman, Conan's Conan is a far cry from the uncouth outsider that trespassed his way through Howard's pages. He speaks a tad too clearly, and is a smidgen too heroic to really jibe with the spirit of the character. Think of the sense of "otherness" that Schwarzenegger's (exaggerated?) accent lent the character in the films. That's all but absent in Conan, and the ravenous frequency of the admittedly amusing jeers he spews at enemies doesn't quite make up for it.

There aren't many appreciable differences between the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Conan. One could argue that gaining Achievements might artificially prolong the enjoyment of the game for 360 players, but that's largely a non-issue for PS3 players, let alone 360 owners who don't care about their Gamerscores. I personally prefer the PS3 game pad for a game like this, but the differences in this area pretty much moot as well. Ultimately, the moment you're no longer excited about unlocking new combos is when you'll likely tire of Conan.

This review is based on a retail copy acquired through THQ PR.