Conan (2007 Video Game) - Reception

Reception

Conan received fair-to-good ratings from critics. In 2008, review aggregator sites Metacritic and Game Rankings selected around 80 reviews and calculated average scores of 69 (out of 100) and 70% for the game, respectively. Most critics agreed that the game's best selling point was its variety in combat. They had a lot of fun with its easy-to-learn controls, skill customization, and most of all, the varied brutal depictions of Conan's kills. TeamXbox said that the combat system "blossoms into a complex string of commands that will reward the user (with gore) for pressing the right buttons at the right time". The pounding, militaristic orchestra tunes accompanying the action further enhanced the critics' experience with the game.

Many critics complained that Conan copied many ideas from God of War. Game Informer referred to this imitation as " groveling at Kratos' feet, begging for gameplay wisdom". A few reviewers, however, found this forgivable and stated that the game was made to be fun without any higher ambitions. Conan's camera system irritated several critics for failing to provide an adequate view of the situation at certain critical moments. Its puzzles were overly simple and lacked clear directions for proceeding to the next step. The artificial intelligence for the adversaries in the game was found to be predictable and flawed by a few critics. In addition, they found the final encounter with Graven to be overly long and frustrating. Calling the fight "as painful as a trip to the proctologist", IGN and Game Informer judged it to be one of the worst boss fights in video game history.

The critics had mixed opinions about three prominent features of the game: voice acting, artwork, and faithfulness to Howard's writings. Perlman earned acclaim for his vocal performance and gravely voice that matched the game's dialogue, but he also received criticism for not sounding like a barbarian. A few applauded Nihilistic for capturing the oil painting feel of Frazetta's art, but several others said that the graphics consisted of drab-looking environments that were jagged-edged and pixelated when zoomed in. Although the animations were rated to be smooth and vivid, the lack of variety among enemy character models was criticized. Several critics also praised Nihilistic for recreating the atmosphere of Howard's stories. The decision to have Conan use magic was, however, called a "blasphemy" by IGN. G4techTV Canada disagreed and forgave the game on the grounds that it was mostly faithful to the books. Ray Huling of The Escapist said that the game's developers misunderstood Conan's appeal to the masses. In the journalist's opinion, Howard's depiction of Conan's brutal physical nature called attention to the dull nature of their lives and offered them a temporary escape. Furthermore, Huling said that Nihilistic used the characteristics of Conan for superficial purposes, and that, in copying the mechanics of another game without any groundbreaking innovations of its own, Nihilistic missed the essence of Howard's stories and created a shell of what its game could have been.

Despite the generally favorable reviews and success of Howard's franchise, Conan was not a commercial success. It sold poorly and failed to recoup THQ's investment. The publisher publicly announced that the game's poor sales contributed to their US$20 million write-off in fiscal year 2008. Although the game's violence was praised by the gaming industry, it was condemned by the National Institute on Media and the Family, which placed Conan on a list of games that parents were urged to avoid buying for their children. Conan's Mature rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board, largely due to its violent content, made the game a target for a law being pushed in California, United States. Proposed in 2005, the law was intended to regulate sales of Mature-rated games. It was blocked by a legal challenge from the gaming industry in 2007, but California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played Conan in the 1982 film, appealed the judgment, seeking to ensure that Conan and other games with similar levels of violence would be sold only to those above the age of 17. On February 20, 2009, His appeal was rejected by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who ruled that such a restriction violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.