Conan

There are plenty of games in which your roided-out hero hacks the arms off hordes of hapless, vaguely evil warriors. There are fewer in which those arms remain on the bloodied ground, rolling to and fro as you walk over them. Conan is one of these games.

As yet another gory, button-mashy God of War clone, Conan is pretty easy to understand: kill everything you see. Sometimes, you'll have to hit different buttons. As is par for the course, there are countless 'techniques' you can learn to execute new moves with particular button combos, but these are largely irrelevant given the pace of the game's combat. Just fucking swing at it until it's dead.

The game world is kind of meh - more colorful than Beast Rider's tribute to brownness, but Mario would find himself quickly bored of it. Same for the enemies, new ones being introduced at an acceptable pace, although you'll wade through the blood of a million of each of them.

I won't claim to be an expert on Hyborian lore, but non-combat segments - making up perhaps as much as 5% of the game - seem more Indiana Jones than Conan the Barbarian. In two hours of play I've fired ballistae on pirate ships, and unlocked two ancient temples (one using switches shaped like cat mouths, the other using switches to align giant flutes with the wind). Occasionally Conan also has to do some cliff-climbing and platform-jumping, but he sucks at it, his ability to jump on and climb up things seriously impacted by shitty collision detection. Falls into ravines have killed me about twenty times more than dudes with swords have.

But the terrible non-combat mechanics feel like they're made up for with the characterization of Conan. The story is neither epic nor offensive, a fairly run-of-the-mill yarn about dark sorcery, but Conan's attitude toward the warrior queen A'Kanna (and everything else in the game) exudes an indomitable spirit of badass. This is a character I could really like, if only his world was at all interesting.

Rescuing topless maidens is also a nice touch.

There is some good and some bad in Conan, but so far nothing has substantially wowed me in one direction or the other. It's a video game. That about covers it.

Progress: Africa? It looks like Africa