Gareth Moffatt

Conan Exiles has the foundations of an excellent survival/crafting/action game, but unfortunately those foundations are rotten. This game rivals ARK not only in its satisfying gameplay loop of surviving, building and taming, but also the bugs baked into the code. The developers have outright admitted this game was a cash grab, built on cheap spaghetti code, while pumping out a dozen different DLCs, going so far as including a daily kiosk in the pause menu ala Ubisoft. As a console player, you cannot progress past level 40/50 - the amount of crafting stations and thralls/pets you need for late game, and the size of your base, eventually cause a memory leak that leads to frequent crashes. When re-entering the game after a crash, half your thralls/pets are deleted, as is your equipped gear, and the inventories of nearby storage containers. If the memory leak was bad enough, your character presets are also deleted, spawning you in with a randomly generated appearance. I've never played a game so littered with bugs, and I say this as a former ARK player. Do not purchase this game or any of its DLC packs - it does not work and I can't imagine these core problems ever being resolved without the game being remade from the ground up.

I'm sure there's a great game in there somewhere, but I couldn't even make it through the tutorial scenarios. Was left very frustrated, being told to change a fence's height, but the option wasn't highlighted and not explained in great detail. I googled it and of course, there's a reddit thread with hundreds of other players who've hit the same issue. There are too many overlays, too many menus, too many buttons on your screen - it's an absolute disaster on console. I've no idea how this same company can make Jurassic World Evolution, and Planet Zoo - JWE has one of the simplest, smoothest menus/UIs of any building sim I've played, all contained in a single menu on the left edge of the screen. PZ has menu bars at the top, bottom and left edges, as well as a more detailed box in the top right corner. It's madness. Building is also very finicky, I could not for the life of me find how to make fences snap to a path. The only options were straight line that did not snap to straight, or curved that does whatever it wants. Animal needs have been fine tuned to be aggravating - it kept telling me to fix an animal's enclosure, but not what needed fixing, eventually discovering that while all of the animals environmental needs were met, they were still unhappy because there was too much grass in the enclosure. It was already there when I was told to build the exhibit, and didn't really explain the how to remove it, I just figure it out (thanks to JWE). Animal breeding is way too fast in standard modes, with no real ability to modify the frequency. Also, egg laying animals giving birth is pretty unforgivable in 2024. If a reddit thread exists for help on the very first tutorial, then something's wrong with your game. In desperate need of UI/menu refinements, and additional support in tutorials.

This feels like it was ripped straight of out the 90s - it's got everything - poorly written women, typical rape fantasies, boring done-to-death action tropes, and unnecessary slow motion shots for everything from firing guns to saddling space horses. This movie feels like someone with no ideas sat down and watched the top 10 sci fi movies from a buzzfeed listicle, and then poured all of those recycled ideas into this movie's script. The first 30 minutes are completely distasteful and disjointed from the remaining plot (which is straight up stolen from Seven Samurai). Genuinely surprised they greenlit a sequel to this movie.

After spending 8 years developing their alpha build game, they've relaunched with.... yet another alpha build game, that will likely flail in development hell for another 8 years. Animal models haven't been updated, some creatures like the poor Megaloceros and Brontosaurus looked outdated in 2015, yet here they are, unchanged in 2023. Environment looks great, but requires a NASA computer to run. So the only actual upgrade from ASE is currently only available on very high end PCs. The nitrado server debacle is worthy of its own 1 star review, as is the game failing certification for release on consoles. Oh and mods available on day 1?! Devkit wasn't even released on launch, let alone the new mod store available with downloads. What a let down to anyone who's been waiting for ARK to be playable. Wildcard are an absolute joke and anything they touch should be avoided with prejudice. Edited after 5 months of post-release support (LOL) from Wildcard. That's the joke - there is none. They've done nothing to address the original problems, and have also actively ignored the new issues ASA caused. Single players can't save, mesh is back to being glitch, caves overspawn, attacks force your tame under the map, PC players had water interactivity turned off, world borders insta killing without explanation etc etc etc. It's all of the original bugs from 2015 repacked in a new game from 2023. The only way this makes sense is if ASA was purely a port into UE5 of the old pre-alpha game from 2015.... Which turns out it is. Hence why 9 year old problems started recurring. Wildcard are a joke.

6 month post launch review - which in the gaming world would usually mean it's better than reviews at launch.... Except, Bethesda have put ZERO work in since release. They released the game on xbox, and have made no major or noticeable changes since. In 6 months time. Updates constantly going out to PC, but seem to never make it to xbox... Not that the updates are anything to write home about. 6 months and the awkward head turning still happens. Every time you run. 6 months and the UI & inventory still look like THAT. Modders had a lot of QoL fixes ready to go within 2 weeks of launch, but Bethesda can't manage to touch anything in 6 months. As if the launch of this game didn't kill hype fast enough, the sheer lack of effort from Bethesda since then guarantees it. Cities and settlements are ridiculous. Why is Neon a single street? It's literally just 2 towers at the end of a street. Capital of the new world feels like a tiny section of Epcot/Disneyworld, and doesn't even have farmlands attached. It's a "city" in the middle of a field. Still can't romance one of the companions properly because the quests don't trigger. It's ok, it's just the gay black guy, who cares right?! Basic game that would have been passable in 2010, is now barely a blip on the radar for 2023.

I love dinosaur games and farm sim games, so this should be a home run. Sadly the game falls short on both those aspects. I fully believe this was intended to be a mobile game - due to the fact your character is so restricted in what they can do compared to other farm sims, and the different trading/purchases options feel like microtransactions. Your house isn't customisable - it's just a save point - you can't enter or decorate it. Or ever seem to fix that broken ladder. Again, this screams mobile game, saving on memory. Any decorations you may obtain have to be placed outside, taking up valuable ranch space. Outdoor living rooms look ridiculous. There's also no crafting like you'd expect in a farm sim - all the resources you collect have to be sold back to the town craftsmen in order to get the simplest of items. Resources are collected with your dinosaurs, which have a very limited stamina pool, with no way of refilling it with food or water. So what you can do in a single day is limited by the stamina you can expend. Game breaking bugs - after day 4 or 5 on my ranch, the items from the day 1 tutorial respawned in my yard. This broke anything on those tiles - dinosaurs, crops, decorations - they're just locked and can't be interacted with. Character customisation also seems to be a memory saving feature - there's 1 character model with a handful of fashion choices that do little to discern gender or personality. I wish I was leaving a 5 star review, but sadly this game falls too short of a comfy, enjoyable farm sim, of which there are plenty of better, less buggy examples.

Game is unplayable to me because of the asinine decision by CDPR to never implement 3rd person view. Cannot play a game in first person. It's a pretty standard feature for RPGs. Mods don't work on console. Absolutely baffling that in 2023, after the terrible launch, this game is still missing some of the most basic features. I customised my V and put him in a cool outfit, yet when cutscenes start, I'm wearing the generic black tee shirt with a print, and still have the horrible face lines I took off. My player and the robot also decided to T-Pose during the tutorial mission. Something CDPR said they fixed a long time ago. Shadows that come from nowhere - you'll notice a fairly accurate shadow on the ground, then notice that it has a lot of moving details missing from the source. It's almost like shadows and LCD screens got mixed up in the code, because I swear there are weird attributes to shadows that make them entirely their own thing with a weird light source. Just look at your shadow in water (still not fixed from launch).

Make no mistake - this is not a sequel. It's the first game repackaged with a lagoon DLC and some improved behaviours, being sold as a complete game with its own DLC. I waited almost a year from launch to play, after being severely burnt by Frontier and their very underwhelming first offering. Youtubers showed an alpha build before release, that seemed to be filled with stop gap measures or quick fixes that would be addressed - the biggest and most obvious example being the weird alien like crab-walking, a quick fix for the awkward skid'n'stop bipeds would do from the first game..... A year later, my experience was exactly the same - all bugs and weird fixes are still present - in fact because they've changed dinosaurs needs since release, the opening tutorial mission no longer works if you follow the prompts - your dinos will fight and die. This didn't happen in alpha, and the tutorial is built around them cohabiting. I was off to a very shaky start, already feeling like I'd wasted money on the sequel, deluxe upgrade, Dino pack, movie pack blah blah for $150+. So I head to sandbox, thinking I'll just watch some giant sauropods roaming.... Only to find out that they've applied this alien crab-walking to sauropods too! My dreadnoughtus broke its legs and spine to spin around on the spot, looking like an eldritch horror in a dark ritual. The gameplay loop hasn't changed, and core issues from the first game remain - comfort & breakouts are tied very closely, but comfort will never stay in the green for long enough to wrangle any more than 1 carnivore at a time. So 1 breaks out while you catch the other. Put it back and now you have to find its friend... Automation that was desperately needed in the original game was added, but in very stupid way - you now need outposts to assign your existing crews to - which sounds great in theory, but not so in practice. My first park, I only had triceratops & struthiomimus (JP scenario, game avoided the film canon species to bring you its own.... Yikes). The rangers and ACU work in tandem - the ACU comes along and tranquilises all the dinos in range when the ranger refills feeders.... Um what?!?! No threat, no attacks, no carnivores, but every time my ranger approached a paddock, the ACU was right behind it ready to knock out the most innocent of herbivores... Let's go to lagoons, surely since they're the selling point, they must have put the work in here, right?! Right...?! And you'll definitely be able to recreate the main street stadium, right?! Wrong. Lagoons are like aviaries from the first game - thoughtlessly tacked on with as little effort as possible. Water is murky and dark, even at high noon, or when lit from underneath using the new lagoon decorations. Don't even get me started on how this game was released a year ahead of the movie it was supposed to tie into, and as a result Frontier are now selling us content that would have been in the game had it released with the movie. Greedy greedy greedy. This game is a joke, it's a really good example of how greed and laziness can sour a long running fan's opinion of the subject matter. Universal needs to end its deal with Frontier and go to a studio with love and passion for the Jurassic series.

Honestly one of my favourite games of all time, and I was so happy playing it, but there were a few issues with the world in general, feeling like it could be more alive. Playing Origins after Odyssey showed what was missing and then some - but I have no idea how these got removed for the subsequent game (Odyssey). One of the more glaringly obvious issues with the world and the lived in feeling is boats - there are fishing boats all over the map - except they're empty. The boats' torches get lit automatically after dark, yet there's no one to light them. After the bro-boat system in Origins, where fisherman were always out on the lakes/rivers, it's just feels dead, and like a massive oversight. Odyssey has one shop - the blacksmith - who sells everything you need, including horses for some reason. Stables don't exist (except for the odd one built into a fort). In Origins, there are Blacksmiths, Fabric shops and Stables - all selling appropriate goods. This helps make the world feel alive, and not like it was lazily coded for convenience (and seriously, where do all the horses live?! There aren't even bars to hitch them to). Roads in Odyssey will only ever have the odd soldier/bandit/civilian walking down them, while in Origins there are migratory caravans with 2 - 3 camels, usually travelling with a shepherd and his goats. Which takes us to the real time events/quests in Origins - like the wild animal attacks, and helping civilians out - while these are both present in Odyssey - they are severely dumbed down and no longer presented as actions the player should do. Which highlights another problem - feeling like you want to help those civilians being attacked by wolves? OK, but be ready for the civilian to attack you when done. Civilians get involved in too many fights - animals, mercenaries, soldiers - they shouldn't be programmed to fight like that. Too many times I'm left killing the civilians who decided to take up arms in a fight against their oppressors. It's little problems like this that can add up - DLC areas feel much more alive than the base game, and hoping that titles moving forward aren't stripped of what makes them feel alive.

Easily my best game for 2020. -Absolutely beautiful setting -Great character models -Hundreds of visual customisation options -Immersive story -Great sense of humour (narration and general gameplay) -Dungeons weren't easy, but didn't make me throw my controller either. Loved the integration of so many different puzzle types/solutions. The pinball vault gets a special mention. -Easy to use controls -So many powers and skills - easy to adapt to your unique play style My only con is it wasn't long enough (70 hours to complete 98%), and some important gods were missing (Hera, Apollo, Artemis, Hades etc). But the DLCs may explain their absence.