Review for Conan Unconquered. PC game, the video game came out on 30/05/2019
Conan Unconquered is an atypical title in the PC RTS landscape. Definito survival by the developers Petroglyph, it is actually a classic Tower defense with strategic and exploration elements. It must be immediately underlined that exploration is decidedly limited as Conan the Cimmerian will not go to conquer new territories but will rather have to study the battlefield and build a stronghold to defend the palace from the enemy on duty.
Talking about the plot for Conan Unconquered is superfluous, as it is enough to know that our hero will be the bulwark between his kingdom and the enemy hordes. However for fans of the lore it will be possible to deepen the background thanks to the comic entitled "Black Colossus" available from the initial menu and whose chapters will be unlocked as you complete the limited campaign made up of 5 challenges, plus the impregnable (in which the waves of enemies will be customizable).
Chosen our hero among the three available - in the deluxe version, while in the standard one we will have only Conan and Valeria - we will find ourselves in a map shrouded in a fog of war and with only the stronghold to keep us company. As for the most classic of strategic, we will therefore have to worry about recovering resources (food, wood, stone, various minerals and so on) and build new buildings in order to create our army and fortify our domain. In the meantime, our hero will be able to run around here and there to find out what lies behind the fog (and no, we are not in the middle of a Carpenter film) to recover some resource guarded by monsters or marauders.
After the first waves of a few enemies, the hordes will become more and more varied and crowded and consequently it will be necessary to carefully consider which structures to build, research to carry out and, above all, which units and fortifications to choose for our defense. The system studied by Petroglyph, veterans of the strategic genre, is interesting and varied but does not suit the type of game chosen for their Conan. The Cimmerian and his units will be able to level up as they eliminate enemies while the walls and defensive structures, as well as certain buildings, can be upgraded after unlocking certain research. But aside from gaining an extra skill for the hero and more damage for the units, evolution will be virtually absent. Otherwise unlocking new buildings will be more satisfying thanks to the ability to access new upgrades, units and defenses. Nevertheless, the title can all be summed up in a build, kill, repair and improve defenses while waiting for a new wave, and could immediately create not a few perplexities in the first approach to its gameplay by a good slice of gamers.
Get over the first few games and get acquainted with a system that is not immediately intuitive and without a classic tutorial, except for some textual warnings Conan Unconquered can be intriguing when taken the right way, that is to say that of a challenge in which to resist increasingly disproportionate waves of enemies, a sort of rather long wind chime (on average each map will take no less than 1-2 hours depending on the number of waves). In addition to this campaign / non-campaign we will then have the opportunity to face the challenges created by the community, accessible through codes shared between players, and an atypical co-op mode for the genre. Forget then PvP to Starcraft and get ready to collaborate with a "colleague" defender who can build and fight alongside you, sharing the resources available. Certainly we are the antipodes from what is expected from a real-time strategy but it is good to reiterate that the peculiarity of this title is to be a tower defense, or rather a survival RTS.
At a graphic level we are definitely stuck to a generation ago but this Unreal Engine 4 "castrated" does its duty and ask for a graphic more pumped to a job of this type would have done nothing but cause heavy slowdowns and frame rate drops in the most excited phases. On the sound sector there is little to say, as everything is reduced to the bone and plays its role without infamy and without praise. The beautiful opening cinematics of Conan Unconquered is, however, a red herring: do not expect other CGI movies to accompany your victories.
Defining Conan Unconquered Survival RTS or Tower Defense makes no difference: Petroglyph's work is undoubtedly a hybrid, an unconventional strategic one. However, this alleged originality does not translate into a thrilling and satisfying gaming experience. The challenge is there and it can tickle the hands and minds of a certain type of player, but it never fully convinces even in the various community challenges or in the cooperative mode, too simplistic and repetitive. Taking a famous and fascinating brand like that of Conan the Cimmerian and turning it into a title that we would see better on smartphones rather than on PCs can only disappoint even the most willing. A missed opportunity.
► Conan Unconquered is an RTS-Strategy game developed by Petroglyph and published by Funcom for PC, the video game was released on 30/05/2019
