My Review

As requested by DrX, I'm gonna review the game Age of Conan. So, please, avert your eyes if you'd rather not see my decent into geekdom. Here's the description from the website:

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is a massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) based on the world and works of acclaimed author Robert E. Howard. In Age of Conan, players enter Hyboria with thousands of their friends and enemies to live, fight, and explore the dark and brutal world of King Conan.

I've been playing this game off and on for just over a month. Now, I have a short attention span, so I'm not one to play the same game long periods of time. I'm what you call a casual gamer. Anyways, this is a pretty good game. What sets it apart from other games is the combat system, very graphic violence and adult themes. The combat system is definitely the most fun thing about the game. There are three keys that you use to control the direction of your attack, and most classes have certain combos that require a specific order of keystrokes, unleashing a spectacular attack. When you kill your opponent with one of these combos there is a chance you will commit a fatality move, such as lopping off their head, lighting them on fire, hacking off both arms, snapping their neck with your bare hands, or ripping out their heart and eating it. Yeah, it's as fucking great as it sounds. Even still, I find myself giggling with glee when I hack apart my enemy in a shower of blood and guts.

The graphics of this game are spectacular, but requires a pretty beefy computer to run well. The world you wander around in is absolutely beautiful. It is definitely the best looking PC game I've played.

Ok, now some of the issues. This is still a very young game, as it just came online in May. One of the things that drew me to this game was the promise of giant PVP battles for battle keeps built by powerful guilds. Well, I'm still waiting for this. It takes a while to form a guild and rise to prominence, as I only know of one server that actually has a keep built. There are many guild towns, but the gathering of resources is monotonous and a long process. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

Also, as of right now, PVP fighting isn't very balanced. I haven't messed around with this too much, but the talk is that the priest classes are too strong and dominate. This is a normal problem, and the game is still in its infancy. One very good thing is that the folks at Funcom are constantly making pretty elaborate patches several times a month.

So, to sum up, this is a young game and has its issues, but is still a lot of fun. As time goes on, the gaming experience is only going to improve, as continuous patches come out, and the guilds get stronger and start battling more. So, if your interested, I'm on the server Thog, and you should join up and make me your friend so we can kill things together. That's all I got folks. I'll stop being a nerd now.