Conan Uncovered challenges players to survive waves of enemies, but a lack of story and a sense of repetition take their toll as you crush your foes.
Conan Unconquered Game Review: Crushing Your Enemies Is Fun, But Flawed
In Conan Uncovered, developer Petroglyph Games has created a unique blend of real-time strategy and wave-based tower defense. The Conan Unconquered trailer suggests an adventurous sense of scale, with vast armies clashing as hero units like Conan himself tear through waves of enemies. In practice, the game fails to deliver the same sense of pride – but it’s still an entertaining title. most of the time.
Players diving into Conan Unconquered will need to master four key game mechanics: exploration, resource management, base defense, and the influence of hero units such as Conan himself. The entire technology tree will be available to players from the start, but it will be up to players to figure out how to best manage resources to build the right units and structures to help them fend off the onslaught of enemies. There’s no tutorial, so Conan Uncovered is a trial by fire from start to finish: players will have to lose a lot at first, but that makes the satisfaction of a successful rescue later all the better. The journey there is longer than it has to be.
The idea is simple and clear: players begin with a base and must protect it from several waves of incoming attackers. The game adheres to a simple structure for units, each of which has strengths and weaknesses against other types. That means players will have to mix and match their armies instead of just spamming a single unit, and they’ll also have to figure out where and when to best use each troop.
This encourages tactical thinking from the player, who often has to decide where to move certain batches of units as they fire one after the other. It’s often literal: Conan Unconquered has a fire mechanic, and every structure is flammable. This adds even more chaos to the mix as players are attacked from multiple sides at once, and this insanity is when the game is at its best.
Players who go outside their defensive walls to search with a hero unit between waves are rewarded with extra experience as they destroy some of the outlying camps that each map offers, and this experience can be used to give powerups to one’s hero unit that let them wreak utter havoc on attackers. It’s a fun risk-versus-reward mechanics, as players have to hop between waves to complete it.
There wouldn’t be a lot of time – nor would they have a lot of spare resources to devote to the quest. In those brief intervals of relative peace, Petroglyph Games was wise to provide gamers with another choice, providing a welcome change from the monotony of merely rebuilding and constructing between waves.
Even so, the waves of attacks are fairly constant and will keep players on their toes. One can feel safe once they block off every bit of flat ground next to the base, so that a wave of spiders can come down from the rocks overhead, wrecking devastation in the centre of the base.
Dead soldiers will also rot and spread disease, and this is where dark magic like necromancy comes into play. Conan Unconquered’s game design allows for some surprises like sandstorms that make areas of the map hard to see, and these give the odd wave here and there some versatility.
There’s no real story behind Conan Unconquered, which jumps around some familiar-looking environments over a span of five missions and builds a base for players to defend. Players can challenge themselves with randomly generated maps and post their high scores online to beat others, but these tend to feel familiar after a few games.
The game would have benefited from some sort of plot, as the experience feels short enough without any suddenness. This is Conan’s biggest downfall. While the game features a stunning opening cinematic that gives the player the feeling that they are about to enter a game full of gorgeous visuals, the actual in-game graphics lag far behind the likes of StarCraft 2 and are more in-line with low-budget RTS titles like Bannermen.
Perhaps more disconcerting is the lack of voice prompts for units: Conan gets stale quickly from hearing the same handful of lines, and in a game already plagued by repetitive nature, this lack of variety really shows itself. makes known.
While the game is said to be a real-time strategy, players are likely to pause a lot while thinking about their next move and ordering units. While the AI pathfinding works relatively well (though it can be spotty when units move in mass), the units still require a lot of micro-managing.
Sections of troops are always at risk of becoming divided, and units almost always need help when it comes to actual fires. Getting units to separate multiple parts of the flaming wall can be troublesome, so the game’s fire mechanic still leaves room for improvement.
They are billions, the real joy in the game comes when massive armies come to a head and the scale of the battle goes beyond what you see in titles like Age of Empires or StarCraft – especially when the battle involves giant gods. There are statues that can easily crush enemies, though it is difficult to survive long enough to use them. Still, it’s a joy to see Conan Unconquered take players to the battlefield when everything is going on at once.
Unfortunately, these moments of Conan-inspired craziness come few and far between in the short skirmishes, and that’s a real shame. It’s also a shame there isn’t much to offer players as they progress through the short campaign: everything starts out unlocked, there’s a bonus hero behind a paywall, so there’s work to be done. There isn’t much. Each match has some variations from the next, but the basic structure of the game repeats quickly.
In conclusion, Conan Uncovered is a high-end RTS tower defense game that offers a tough challenge for gamers, but the lack of a story or reward system makes for a fast-paced gameplay. Petroglyph Games has thrown in a few twists and turns so that Conan Unconquered offers a few surprises mid-game, but even they can’t take away the feeling that something is missing in Conan Unconquered, especially since it Comes from a development staffer who has worked on RTS gems like Command & Conquer. It’s fun, but it clearly could have been more – and it’s become a familiar rhetoric when it comes to the Conan games.
