Age of Conan: Unchained
- Area: Europe
- Official Site: Age of Conan: Unchained
- Publisher: Funcom GmbH
- Developer: Funcom GmbH
- Platform: Microsoft Windows
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Overview
Age of Conan is a 3D fantasy game and MMORPG comprised of deep, story-driven single-player questing, multiplayer dungeons, and brutal open-world PvP.
Age of Conan's entry to the Free-to-Play genre has been long awaited in the online community; alongside its breathtaking DirectX 10 visuals, Age of Conan offers a Player vs. Player experience like no other before, with mounted combat, guild-controlled city sieges and open-world PvP carnage beginning as low as level 5.
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Features
- Open-World PvP and City Sieges
- Unprecedented Character Customisation
- High-Quality Animations and Visuals
- Area: Europe
- Official Site: Age of Conan: Unchained
- Publisher: Funcom GmbH
- Developer: Funcom GmbH
- Platform: Microsoft Windows
Like this game? Tell your friends!
Review
Age of Conan is a 3D fantasy game and MMORPG comprised of deep, story-driven single-player questing, multiplayer dungeons, and brutal open-world PvP.
Age of Conan's entry to the Free-to-Play genre has been long awaited in the online community; alongside its breathtaking DirectX 10 visuals, Age of Conan offers a Player vs. Player experience like no other before, with mounted combat, guild-controlled city sieges and open-world PvP carnage beginning as low as level 5.
With most MMOs the divide between good and evil is obvious. Like those bad, golden-age westerns, where the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys black, MMOs make it stupid-easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Highfalutin, noble elfs - good. Crass, brutish orcs - bad. And just in case the race distinctions aren't enough, many MMOs are still dressing their good guys in white and their bad guys in black.
The Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures (AoC) puts its finely-honed blades right through the heart of this prosaic MMO formula. If elfs and orcs, and their black-and-white, good-and-evil world has grown a bit stale for you, the Age of Conan offers an alternative.
The Age of Conan is a world of intrigue and plots, filled with scoundrels and thieves. And you're one of them. The divide between good and evil is not as clear in AoC as it is in other games. In fact, it's not much of an issue. In this regard, AoC is true to the world of Conan created Robert E. Howard: It is a cruel, brutal world where there is little time for the being concerned with the nicety of who is good and who is evil.
AoC provides a nice variety of class options. You can play a barbarian, of course, or a demonologist or an assassin or any one of twelve different classes. There's a good mix and enough differences in classes that you don't feel you're playing the same old class you've played in a thousand other fantasy MMOs.
Character creation is limited. Oddly enough, AoC allows you a abundance of different options for changing your body types, allowing you to build characters of different heights and musculature, but provides you with few options for changing facial traits like hair styles and eye color.
AoC's graphics are also lacking. The characters actually look more primitive than older games like World of Warcraft, and the graphics engine is slow generating the world. As you move through the game you'll see the landscape being generated before you.
As appropriate for a character in Conan's world, you will begin your journey at the very bottom of society as a slave. The slave ship you're on wrecks, you wash up on shore and your journey begins. AoC, unlike many MMOs, has a good storyline. Take a little time to read it. You rescue maidens, kill slavers and fight monsters. Good times.
There's only one path for advancement. You'll start as a slave on that ship every single time. You'll rescue the same maiden, kill the same slavers and monsters. No matter which character class or culture you come from its always the same.
AoC's combat system is not a single-button-mashing system. In fact, if you try to get by by mashing just one button, you'll die. The combat system uses chain skills. One skill chains off the success of a previous skill, spawning more deadly attacks. This makes for exciting, high-interactive combat that actually helps draw the player more completely into the gameplay. You get a very strong sense the outcome of combat depends on how you play.
If you're used to MMOs where you could get by with one or two skills, or you've never encountered chain skills before, it will take a little while to get used to AoC's combat system. It's not so bad. Stick with it. It actually makes the combat fun and, at time, exhilarating.
If you chain together the right combination of combat skills you'll trigger a finishing move that will splatter your opponent's blood across your screen. That's just awesome! Robert E. Howard would approve.
No world of Conan would be complete without armed conflict. AoC focuses on player-versus-player (PvP). The game does have player-versus-environment (PvE) dungeons, but they're not the focus of the game – PvP is the selling point. There are PvP instances, massive – almost war-like – PvP conflicts, and PvP keep sieges.
The Age of Conan's departure from the old, tired good-versus-evil formula is refreshing. The storyline quests are interesting, but will get tiresome when you level up more characters. The graphics are disappointing and the character creation is limited, but the combat system is innovative and adds an extra level of excitement to the gameplay. And, if you love fighting and killing the other guy – And who doesn't? – AoC's PvP focus is very appealing.
Overall, Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures is a refreshing and exciting game. Enter the world of Conan, cast away your preconceptions of good and evil, and slaughter your enemies in style.
