Conan: No Love For This Barbarian

I am tired of shooters.

Now, please don't get me wrong: we've had a pretty good run recently. Beginning in August, I had the pleasure of playing through BioShock, followed by the somewhat over-hyped Halo 3 and since mid-October I've been plugging my way through the triple threat presented by The Orange Box. I even paid some fan service to a forgotten title from early 2007 and picked up GRAW 2 to enjoy the shortest single-player campaign in video game history.

(Please don't mention Portal, since it's bundled with two other exceptional games and can hardly be compared with a standalone sequel the likes of GRAW 2)

I was being subjected to an aggravating jumping sequence in Half-Life 2: Episode One when it suddenly dawned on my how shooter'ed out I am. As much as I love the genre, I don't think I could maintain my sanity if I saw yet another targeting reticle hovering in the center of my TV. My shooter fatigue could not have come at a worse time. Call of Duty 4 just hit the shelves, with Army of Two and Kane & Lynch following close behind. Even my must-buy game for November, Mass Effect, has heavy shooting in its combat system, so there is literally no escaping the influence of shooters this holiday season.

That's why the new Conan game came as such a breath of fresh air. There's something to be said for context and mood. When my shooter fatigue was first beginning to set in, I had played the Conan demo and quite in spite of my pre-conceptions of the tired button-mashing play mechanics, I quite enjoyed it.

When the full game was released last month, I paid no mind, since I was happily involved with coloured portals and reliving the brilliance of the original Half-Life 2 solo campaign. To add to my ambivalence was the unanimously negative press Conan had received. The game has been savaged by critics for any number of reasons, most of them I feel are pretty unfair criticisms. Everything from the short length of the campaign, to the lack of multiplayer and it's unabashed cloning of God of War has been mentioned in most of the reviews. The actual review scores are even more brutal, with 5's and 6's being the norm and only the occasional 7 breaking up the pattern.

Knowing all of this well in advance, I still went out and paid full price for this game. Call me a sucker for gore and nudity if you want, but this game is just what I needed. What I needed to do is wash my palate clean of firearms, reloading clips and throwing grenades and embrace the barbarian within.

Conan is no A-list masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. The game is simply a fun, good old fashioned romp. The fighting system is simple, without being dumbed down and offers enough variety to actually learn a few handy moves and not have to resort to button mashing through every battle. The presentation is very unambitious for a 3rd generation Xbox 360 title, but they do the job well enough. What the game lacks in texture detail and complex geometry, it more than makes up for with its smooth animation and impressive sound track.

And you know what else is good about Conan? Yes, it's the gore. Dismemberment is the name of the game here. Besides, what's the incentive for performing a parry-counterattack or a power combo if the payoff wasn't bucket loads of blood and piles of severed limbs? Conan makes no apologies with its mature content and I for one am glad to see a game have this kind of content and not be yet another shooter.

Give this game a try. It will put hair on your chest.