Conan Exiles Xbox One Review

"Sandy Survival"

Multiplayer

Conan Exiles has grown to be a rather large survival experience that does indeed capture the essence and visceral style of the Conan universe. It's an open world survival game with a focus on multiplayer elements. You can play it in local single player or even private coop if you'd like, but the online is where it thrives. I'll mention that online PVP and PVE options are present. In the game you start out with nothing, just some lost soul in the middle of a scorching desert. From there you're sent out into the world with some loose guides and freedom to do whatever.

I will mention that prior to starting there's a character creator with a lot of depth to it. There are even levels of nudity, breasts in North America if selected and full nudity in some regions for Europe. Don't get too attached to your character however as death is an aspect of life in this rough world. It's a large area spanning multiple biomes and filled with challenges. There's not much of a narrative here, but a focus on exploration. You can face off against massive bosses, work with others or against them and take in an area filled with lore.

Gameplay

This is mostly a third person adventure, you can adjust that however. It's a survival game so you'll need to manage the essentials such as food, water and your shelter. The elements can cause damage too such as extreme heat, blistering sand storms or other conditions as you travel into other environments. It's fairly streamlined in terms of what you're doing as you collect resources to craft. There's just a lot of complexity in advanced systems such as getting "workers", building larger structures and getting to higher levels of craftsmanship.

Conan Exiles is also very much an RPG experience where you level, distribute skill points and work through tech trees for better items. You can pair up with others to form clans or be straight up hostile. Other players will attack you, as will various tribal NPCs that travel around or live in camps. Visually the game is very impressive on Xbox One X which is where I played it mostly. It's an enhanced title featuring great draw distances, superb visual rendering and excellent performance. As far as the console versions go I was certainly most impressed here.

The Conclusion

The Conan Exiles Xbox One version is a great way to experience this open world survival game. It delivers on the visceral combat you'd expect from the source material and presents it in a streamlined way. Everything runs well with grand draw distances, great loading and intense online situations. There's a nice balance online of crazy people and those that want to work with each other to survive.

The game is packed with content the further you explore whether you want to tackle large monsters or build shelters. You can choose to craft tons of objects, gather ever so many resources and unlock higher tiers of construction options. It's all handled well being a smooth game to play. The core of this is with the online multiplayer, but I'll mention it once more that a local game option is present along with a private cooperative one.

Read our Ark: Survival Evolved Review
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Conan Exiles Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by Evolve PR

Rating Overall: 8.6