Age of Conan - Hyborian Adventures (PC)

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Taking down mythical beasts was something else we were unfortunately not able to try out

Example: I've just met my first NPC, a guy who greets me as I awake from being washed up on the shores of Tortage, a jungle area where all players will begin their Hyborian adventure. AoC tries to do something a little different with its NPC interaction. You've got a good deal of voice acting, a dialogue system where you pick what sentences you want to say rather than read a quest script and you've got an effort from Funcom to make proceedings a bit more cinematic, so you're not just reading and scrolling through a little window that pops up when you chat to someone.

It feels a bit like a fantasy version of Mass Effect's dialogue system, except less good and without the conversation wheel. At the end of the day it's more Monkey Island than Mass Effect. And it's here where I encountered my first problem. The camera didn't seem to know where to position itself to give me that Mass Effect-esque cinematic shot when I talked to an NPC. Often half the NPC's head would be chopped off, or the camera would only show the bottom of a face. It's a nice idea, but it seems that it hasn't been properly implemented yet. I'm told I was playing a three-month old build, and that might explain the problems. But why show such a bug-ridden version of the game to journalists unless you have to?

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If you do discount the bugs, AoC is a perfectly polished, competent fantasy MMO that feels like it has tonnes of depth and will certainly attract an audience. But, despite being constantly told by Funcom that it is vastly different to WoW, all I kept thinking as I was levelling my character and, indeed, when I got to play in a group of level 25s in an instanced area, was that everything I was doing I've already spent hundreds of hours doing in WoW.

Creating your character is an example of this. You're a slave on board a boat, stood up in the centre of the screen ready for your input. There's tonnes of customisation options available for tweaking the look of your character, from adding crazy haircuts to mysterious body tattoos, and you can even go as far as to moulding your height and body shape, but at the end of the day you're picking from a selection of races and classes that all fantasy RPG players will be familiar with.

You start by selecting your culture, which is effectively your race, from Aquilonian (like the Romans), Cimmerian (like the Celtics) and Stygian (like the Egyptians). All are human. There are no elves or dwarves in AoC. Then it's on to your class. You've got four main options here: Soldier, Priest, Rogue and Mage. There are then three sub-classes to choose from within these four main classes. So within the Soldier class you have the Guardian, Dark Templar and the Conqueror. Or within the Rogue class you have the Barbarian, Assassin and Ranger. I decided to go with the exotically named Herald of Xotli from within the Mage class, described as a dark mage able to transform into a fiery demon. I wanted to see exactly how AoC's mage gameplay differed from WoW's - I wanted to put Funcom's claim to the test.

AoC has a much darker feel than other MMOs on the market

So you wash up on a beach on the Barachan Isles with no memory of who you are. This old bloke, the first NPC you meet, advises you to kill the slave master from the boat in which you created your character before he gets to the city of Tortage. You see slaves are the scum of the Earth in Conan's universe, and if the slave master blabs about your past, you'll be dead meat. He also advises that you seek out an old sage called Nadin once you get there.

So off you trot into this lush, green jungle. You'll immediately come across a scantily-clad woman, strung up and left for dead. She wants you to kill the people who did this to her in exchange for leading you to the city. Being the chivalrous hero that you are you duly oblige, heading back to the beach to kill the ruffians. It's is here that you'll get your first taste of AoC's unique combat system.

It works like this: You have three standard melee attacks, one from the left, one overhead and one from the right, initiated by pressing 1, 2 and 3 on the keyboard respectively. Enemies have three levels of defence to distribute across these three areas of attack, displayed by silver arrows. So what you need to do is go for the area that's least defended, so you can cause maximum damage. Simple.

This is one of the things Funcom says makes AoC's combat more compelling than any other MMOs on the market and hopefully will make the MMO "grind" more bearable. This may well be true for the game at higher levels and against real players, but in the early part of the game it's simply a case of hitting the right button to attack the weakest side of the mob. There's no real skill to it, even when the mob switches its defence around. It's almost like a rhythm action game.

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