Conan Exiles

This review is for the PVE part of the game only.

Conan Exiles is a beautiful, fun game to explore. Sadly for the PVE part I feel like content is extremely limited and can get boring pretty fast.  Conan is a survival game that has PVE, PVP, or PVE with PVP at certain times.  Survival at first can be tedious as you gather and craft your tools, weapons, and first set of clothes eating bugs on the way to a water source. Crafting a bedroll and placing it down will let you spawn there if you die. You will have to find a good spot to build a base so that you can craft the utilities needed to produce better weapons and gear.  Once you have a base you can make a bed to spawn at that base and lay down a bedroll somewhere else for an alternative spawn point. Don't forget about the purge. Its a timed event that spawns NPCs that could attack and destroy your entire base if you don't have protection with pets or thralls. When it works right. There are server settings that can change how purges (and everything) works but for normal settings if you are on a server alone it will always pick you and attack your base once a day. The server that I mainly played on had purges until the last update which seemed to break them. You can find player made map-rooms which allow you to teleport to obelisks that you will find while out and exploring. Crafting a map-room of your own will require higher level character and gear to find the recipe and gather the necessary ingredients. Weather also plays a role in Conan. It can speed up your metabolism making you thirsty and hungry. It can even start taking your health if you get too hot or too cold so you have to wear armor appropriate for the right environment. This also applies for your base but only really matters in cold locations, you may have to build for warmth. There are lesser bosses that you may be able to take on alone and there are some that will require you to bring a few friends along with. There are a few dungeons that are relatively small. Conan also features a perk you may know from Zelda Breath of the Wild. You can climb pretty much anything. It may be tricky at first but jumping from the top of a mountain and catching on and repeating until you are at the bottom can be extremely fun!  Just don't mess up or that could mean you lose everything!  Yeah if you die by default server settings you will lose everything on your character.  If You can get back to your dead body in time you can save all of your lost items.  

Finding creations from other players is the funnest enjoyment I had got from the game. You can find fortresses with amazing detail and everyone has different tastes. I saw incredibly large player made bases, pyramids, and even known walls to have been built around other players bases when they are blocking certain resources or areas. On the downside occasionally I have had the load times of the player made bases slow to load which can lead to invisible walls and even damage your character.

Building bases can be very fun and sometimes frustrating. Weird placement issues on the ground and items refusing to attach no matter what.  Building backwards or from the top down would be the only way to accomplish certain tasks. Fun fact, if you have issues placing a piece you can try to remove any doors around the area. This once solved an issue that was four blocks away from the doorway. Anything crafted and placed down or made will have a set decay timer so that the servers do not get clogged up with unused buildings. The timer is 144 hours and should reset as long as you or someone in your clan logs in to reset the timers. Everything has to be connected around your base to have the same timer, if it is not connected it will have a different timer that you will have to reset by interacting with.

The combat is fun at first using different weapons and mixing combos but the netcode and some of the animations feel completely broken. Certain enemies feel glitchy like the Rhino who you can get stuck in their horns and often has teleported mid charge. The bows were useless in my experience unless you use them to just pull enemies with. Some weapons like the spear has incredible range and can stun lock very fast. There is also a religious system that allows you to build altars. Each having a small benefit and eventually leading to the ability to summon large avatars to help demolish enemy bases in PVP servers.

The pet and thrall system is laughable. Its about the worst AI I have ever saw. Capturing the pets is easy as running over the young animal and pressing the interact key. Both will just stand there once placed. Sometime they will defend your base, sometimes they wont. The Thrall randomly decide if they will use the weapons in their inventory. Instead of having attack or defend options when one is following you, they will only attack something if you get hit first. Many times I have ran inside a building or shelter and had problems getting back out because my pet is blocking the doorway and refuse to move. Sometimes "replacing" them in another location will work but some locations you can not do this. You do have to feed both pets and thralls to keep them alive now. This is nice because before the pet update leftover thralls were literally everywhere and even standing on invisible platforms where old bases used to be.

Overall I've enjoyed Conan Exiles and had a blast building a base and exploring the world of Conan with a few friends. Overall I am at 200 hours and may put in a few more but I do not expect to play much longer. Over half of that time is gathering and building. Normally I welcome PVP in games but I really wanted this to be a PVE experience and would love more content.