Vast Emptiness.

The proliferation of the survival genre since the boom of Minecraft has spawned some big names such as Rust, DayZ, and Ark: Survival Evolved. Each one of those games also got a respectable following during their early access periods. The latest survival game, Conan Exiles, has just left its own version of early access and… It could have used some more time.

Price: $49.99
Platform: XB1 (reviewed on X), PS4, PC
Price I’d Pay: $15

Players, who start with nothing, aspire to survive in the wasteland of Conan the Barbarian by crafting tools and weapons, building shelters and living off the land. As their character levels up they learn new recipes for crafting, which lead to more options – to an impressive extent. Players can also level up desired stats that award perks when a tier is reached.

Acquiring the basic supplies is more of a chore, rather than a challenge. Wood, stone, and animal meat is everywhere and easy to obtain. Even the more valuable resource, iron, is easy to find just lying around in giant ore veins above the surface. The biggest obstacle in this process is the carrying capacity to hold all the easily-obtained resources, which makes for a lot of travel back and forth for storage.

Crafting and Exploring

Many recipes can be crafted anywhere (just in the menus) but other, better things will require various workbenches and other crafting stations. To craft here, the necessary supplies need to be stored at that station to make the crafting work. It’s cool that these can store supplies, but it adds a lot of unnecessary item management, which doesn’t gel with its cumbersome and complicated menus – at least with a controller.

Once the basics are obtained, it’s time to venture out to get rarer resources and items. You’d hope that since Exiles has one map, it would be dense with things to discover. Unfortunately, it’s quite the opposite. The vast, aesthetically pleasing landscape is littered with uninteresting combatants, boring dungeons that give pitiful loot, and every now and then, an idle NPC who has a few lines of dialogue. Potential enemies, humans and otherwise, mostly stay still, staring off into space until you come close enough for them to initiate.

Most of the challenge of the game is figuring out how its convoluted crafting system works – what material leads to the next, where to obtain it, etc. The game doesn’t do a good job at showing the player a roadmap of progression because there’s so many resources, so many things to build, specific ways to build them, with not enough information on how they all work together. It’s a confusing jumble, with the only remedy being a wiki search for basic info.

Playing alone is boredom

Due to the world being as dull as it is, I would not recommend Conan Exiles as a solo experience. Building a badass base, hopefully with friends, would without a doubt be the best way to play. The options for building pieces are great and they all snap together nicely.

There are PVP and PVE servers, but seeing other people walking around was a rare occurrence for me. You can see what structures others have built and there are plenty of methods to keep people from stealing things from other players.

Admins of a server have an impressive suite of controls at their disposal. Combat difficulty, crafting time, and survival-stat modifiers can all be adjusted to make things easier or harder. Other options like being able to keep items upon death add a lot of customization of experience.

It a dull, dull world out there

I’ve seen a lot of progress through the game’s early access days, but it’s nowhere close to where it should be for a $50 release. While walking around the world, its enemy behaviors and animations resemble games from a distant past, glitches are very common, and the environments include nothing of substance.

In this particular version of the Conan the barbarian, the world was too dull and unpolished to lure me in. The crafting system – while confusing – is unquestionably deep, which enabled me to build some cool things in an environment that offered no true variety or immersion.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.