While gearing myself up for the Age of Conan game, I started to delve into the world of Conan, reading a few of the graphic novel trades to get in the Conan fighting spirit. I loved the fact that this brute was the man who all men wanted to be, and that he could get away with things in his world that probably wouldn't fly in ours. After hearing of Age of Conan's delay, in stepped Conan for the Xbox 360 to give me some Conan action, and by Crom it isn't that bad.

THE STORY SO FAR
The story of Conan has him breaking into a tomb, only to meet an evil that destroys his armor and flings him to the farthest corner of the world, leaving Conan with little idea how he got there. Soon Conan meets up with A'Kanna, a bow branding woman warrior, and off they set sail on adventure to restore her homeland, and to gather the missing pieces of Conan's armor so that they may drive away the evil that befell Conan in the beginning.

The story is mostly told through pre-level in-game cutscenes, which usually involves the characters talking more than anything else. Though there isn't much action in these story elements, the thing that drives home the narrative is the dialogue, which radiates with cool thanks to Conan's womanizing bravado. For instance, after saying how he has never been in the service of a man, he gladly tells A'Kanna that he would service her – if you get our drift.

Conan is very much a man's game, as there are plenty of double entendres, the women are all seemingly easy and wanting to have sex with Conan, and secret unlockables for rewards appear as topless women who need you to break their chains to free them of bondage. Of course, what woman who has just been saved wouldn't offer sexual services to her rescuer…right?

If you know the Conan franchise, however, things like that fit perfectly in the game. Conan is a brute first and foremost, he has sex with women, and he likes to heal himself by drinking ale. One thing the developers should be commended for is how they took the Conan franchise and really ran with it, giving fans a game that pays homage to the original source material wonderfully.

GAMEPLAY
Conan is strictly a single-player game that controls and plays much like God of War. As Conan you'll run around linear environments fighting off different enemies, usually culminating in a risk free environment that then lets you look around and solve a puzzle to let you move on to your next area and keep doing the same thing. Then, once you get to the end of a level, you have to fight a giant boss.

Though it basically steals from God of War that doesn't mean it's a complete rip-off or a terrible game. Combat is quite visceral, making you have to not only attack during opportune moments, but have to block and dodge as well. A few enemies can be killed by just hacking and slashing, but others, such as the gorillas, have a set attack pattern, and you'll have to learn it so that you can avoid damage while dishing it out. Other enemies will wear thick armor or yield a shield, and before you can do any real damage to them you first have to destroy their armor so they can finally take damage, though they'll still often block with their weapons.

Combat involves swords, which come in three flavors of fighting style: 1) one-handed (average damage on all accounts), 2) two-handed sword (slow attacks but strong damage), and 3) duel-wielding (quick attacks but low damage). In order to do your best you'll have to figure out what weapons to wield and when, such as using two blades for when you are surrounded and using a two-handed weapon when fighting a powerful enemy. The weapons are plentiful, as you can take any weapon off the ground after you've killed the person who was using it.

As you advance you'll gain red runes for beating enemies and discovering chests, and you can use these to give you a wide variety of moves, all which can be used constantly to be mastered. However, though you get a bunch of moves, a few light attacks followed by a heavy (or some minor combination of those two attacks) is really all you need. Besides weapons, you can always grab enemies and throw them off piers or ledges, or better yet throw them on spears and spikes and impale them.

Another important part of Conan's fighting repertoire is his parries, which give you the chance to instantly kill an enemy by blocking at the exact moment that they attack. The parries don't work all the time, as some enemies won't allow you to get them off, but many of the human enemies let you parry just fine. The parries are the goriest parts of the game and the moves differ depending on what weapons you are holding and which button the game has you press to activate the parry. Typical parry finishes include neck slashes, beheadings, cleaving someone in half vertically, having someone cleaved in half horizontally, and basically kicking someone's head off. It's gory though fun, and you'll enjoy battling whole groups of enemies by doing nothing more than parrying them to death.

The enemies are mostly men or variations of men, though there are the occasional animal such as a lion or a raging gorilla. The enemies are done pretty well, though there are moments of stupidity where they will just stand around and not attack you, and the worst glitch was when the game wouldn't let me land an attack at all on an enemy, and it took something like lighting him on fire to get him out of his unbeatable loop. What the enemies lack in intelligence they make up for in number, as you'll rarely have one-on-one battles, which means prepare to be stabbed in the back and side plenty of times. Combat controls get a little wonky with multiple combatants too, as sometimes you'll want to focus on one enemy, but Conan will auto attack the nearest enemy to him instead of the one you were focusing on; it's not a major problem, but it proves annoying on more than one occasion.

The bosses, much like God of War, are part combat and part puzzle, as you need to find out what to do to ultimately kill a boss, but having to do physical damage to them first before you can get to the puzzle part. Bosses include such things as giant sand dragons and mammoth skeletons. Much like the God of War series, there are also quite a few QTE (quick time event) situations, which require you pressing buttons in order to do damage to a boss in a mini-cutscene, opening a giant door, or constantly pressing a button to raise or lower something. The QTE moments aren't hard to accomplish, but they break up the action sometimes a bit too much; they aren't bad and they aren't good, they're just kind of there.

GRAPHICS
Conan from a distance isn't too bad looking, but the closer you get to characters the worse their faces look, and hair doesn't look like individual strands but rather clumps of hair matted together like dreadlocks. The game isn't hideous to look at, it just lacks the polish and sharp visuals of other 360 titles. Many environmental objects, for instance, are muted and fuzzy, lacking the distinction and crisp quality you've seen before in a Gears of War or Halo 3.

SOUND
The sound of combat is nice and is done well, but the music and voice acting is the best. The music has that high-fantasy meets Gladiator mix, while the character lines are delivered pitch perfect to mimic the sort of B-movie outrageousness that Conan embodies. Ron Perlman does a great Conan voice, and Claudia Black is smooth, charming, and ferocious as A'Kanna.

IN CONCLUSION
Conan is far from being a Game of the Year contender, but if you're a fan of Conan you'll appreciate how well it sticks to the roots of the franchise. It has plenty of shortcomings, but at the end of the day the game was still pretty fun, and it kept me battling till the end.

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