How is it?
Having played extensively, I’ll start with the fact that I did not like the game when I initially started playing. It seemed interesting enough, but it took me understanding how the systems worked to really get into the nitty-gritty of dumping hours into it.
You start off as a person with a mask of your choosing, and over time learn that the game isn’t about the person you are playing as, as much it is the mask. Now, they have since changed the fact that you’d have to grind for the perfect 10/10 stats for tribe members, although you still can. In this game you go from scorching volcano to frozen mountaintop to lush jungle. If you have played Conan: Exiles before, this won’t shock you. However, the aspect of building a tribal community that is whole-heartedly devoted to your maskliness can get pretty fun. As things ramp up, you are finding cool new weapons, armor, and places to live. If you’re anything like me, you get halfway to two-thirds through a base build before you see a place on your adventure and think “Damn. Wish I would’ve built there.”
The building mechanics are pretty standard, albeit slightly frustrating at times. but it does come with some payoff, while my friend and I were playing, we decided to crank the difficulty as it felt less and less challenging and more grindy. This led to more raids on our settlement, and forcing us to build a castle, which was pretty fun & awfully time consuming. We enjoy our cheesing in our games and often times start these with hunting NPCs with sharper rocks than our own. This had lead to some really high highs and some really low lows. Nothing hurts more than losing some of your sharpest rocks or even gangly metal weapons and armor to some giga-chad NPC.
If you couldn’t tell by now, we played as a duo and not on a public server. I personally have never liked playing on public servers with these kinds of games, notable references like Conan: Exiles & ARK come to mind.
Once you start defeating major bosses and sifting through some of the mystical elements is where this game really hits its stride. Suddenly, we had over 100 hours in what felt like a couple days. The game has enough systems to keep you occupied but not overwhelmed. One I never quite paid attention to was the hunting aspect, but both of us were fully enveloped in beating the next big thing so it kinda fell by the way-side.
By the end of it, we had done our best to find every secret, every nook and cranny we could do ourselves before we took to the standard of Googling what the hell were we supposed to do. Ultimately, and unfortunately,
it came to somewhat of an abrupt end as these games so often do. When not playing a PvP server or a PvE server where other interesting things might happen, once you beat the last big thing it just hits you like “well… now what?”
But! The new update just rolled in and with the oh so generous free (for now) DLC, it’s worth noting that this game has a breath of fresh air and I will be absolutely ready to take on these new challenges.
I have yet to truly test it on the Steam Deck.