Conan (PS3)

Conan may be twice the man Kratos is, but you wouldn't know from playing his game.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

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.