Conan Unconquered Review (PC) - Softpedia News

Set within the pseudo-hystorical Hyborian Age, Conan Unconquered follows you as your struggle to resist wave after wave of enemy forces, and for the first time in Conan's life, his job is not to conquer, but rather to stay Unconquered.

The game follows a simple premise: You start off with a base, and you have to withstand waves upon waves of enemy forces. You have to expand your base, gather and manage resources, build defensive buildings along key choke-points, and all this within certain time frames.

The myths, the legends, the ones who cannot be stopped

The backbone of any match within Conan Unconquered is the hero you control, and currently the game allows you to control either Conan or Valeria, with a third hero only being available with the proper DLC installed.

Each hero starts off with a different set of stats and is capable of filling in a variety of roles.

For example, Conan is melee brawler that you use when you want to go all Medieval (or better said ‘Hyborean”) on your enemies, While Valeria acts more as a support or backline fighter with a focus on aiding a big army.

Only the strongest will survive

Waves start off as small and almost negligible, as your main hero is enough to single-handedly manage the first two waves, but you mustn’t sit around idly while he is doing so, as you have to prepare for when the bigger armies come.

The number of waves is adjustable when you set up a match, acting as one of the many elements that increase or decrease the difficulty of a match.

Another element that can make or break your game is the number of choke points you have around your starting base. The map around you will be filled with areas of impassable terrain with just a few openings through which the enemy waves will start pouring and where you should concentrate your efforts of building walls, gates and guard towers.

Both maps and the waves that will be coming for you are procedurally generated, so no game will ever feel the same, so don’t bother trying to make strategies for specific scenarios, just try to get better at the game in general.

Rock, paper, magic bolt

I have a weakness for games that feature the good old rock-paper-scissors gig when it comes to how units fair against one another, and that is something you’ll see in Conan Unconquered. As always, cavalry units beat ranged units, ranged units beat foot soldiers, and the foot soldiers beat cavalry.

The game is actually quite adamant about using strategy over mindless unit training, since the ranged units can deal tremendous amounts of damage, but will die extremely easily, while the melee troops are so tough when it comes to punishment it seems almost ridiculous, but they hit as if they have pool noodles for a weapons.

What this means is that building a squad made up of only one type of unit will do you no good, and balancing out damage-dealers, tanks and supports will be crucial.

Blades and arrows aren’t the only things that kill you in war

I loved how the developers managed to introduce a lot of elements never before seen in RTS games which actually make a lot of sense when you come to think about it.

For example, since waves will be concentrated around choke points, it is only natural to assume that corpses will start piling up on top of each other at your walls and gates. These corpses eventually rot and become the harbingers of disease and decay, poisoning all living units around them with a slow-ticking DoT which can be devastating if left untreated.

More so, your buildings can be set ablaze with fire, and the hero is the only one who can extinguish the fire, making base micro-management one of the biggest challenges that you’ll have to face.

Fantastic monsters and where to hunt them

Magic is also an essential part of the Hyborean Age, and you’ll see plenty of it in the form of units that can perform miracles and spells, as well as the plethora of creatures scattered along the map.

The most powerful of these creatures are the Guardians, and there are usually three of them on each map.

Defeating guardians (which will not be an easy task at all) will eventually grant you access to powerful artifacts which will bolster your hero’s strength far beyond what he could do normally, allowing him to eventually scale up with the ever-increasing waves that are at your walls.

Champions get the right to brag

You get a score based on your performance at the end of the match, and you can use the "Challenge" feature to make other players to try and beat your score.

What this basically does is it saves the map you’ve just played, and makes it available for the general public to try out, and they have to play and see if they can do a better job than you.

With each difficulty element you modify, your score multiplier will increase or decrease, with someone selecting the most hardcore of settings receiving up to six times more points than someone who played the map with the easiest settings.

The Good

The franchise
The unique gameplay
The graphics
Great unit diversity
The focus on strategy rather than numbers
Quotes that have references
High replay value
Procedurally generated content

The Bad

Wave difficulty may feel as if it ramps up too fast at some point
Heavy reliance on your hero's well-being

Conclusion

At first glance you'll maybe think to yourself that Conan Unconquered sounds more like a Tower-Defense game but without the towers, but that isn't even a quarter of the story here.

Careful management of your resources and how you spend them as well as keeping a watchful eye on your hero is key if you want to survive the last waves of enemies.

All in all, It was extremely refreshing giving Conan Unconquered a shot, and I have to admit it did bring back some fond memories from when i used to spend my nights playing RTS games and had to withstand enemy zerging.

"Conan” will forever be engraved in our collective memory as the name of the greatest fictional barbarian that has ever lived, and with such a great legacy to live up to, the burden of pulling off a good game based on the Conan mythos is great.

The people at Petroglyph, a gaming studio renown for their great RTS titles of the past, challenged themselves to accept this burden, and as far as I’m concerned, they pretty much pulled it off.

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