Game Reviews

In days long passed when talented studios strode the land with their heads full of dreams, faces bright, straight-backed and brows unfurrowed by the burden of strife that comes with tackling the financial monsters of an MMO's post-release period, we regularly played our Age Of Conan: Hyborian Adventures account.

This was a massively multiplayer golden age, where aspiring to Warcraft population levels wasn't a fool's hope and any theme outside of traditional high fantasy was where the gold rush could be found. But the integrity of this bubble was destined to fail, and around the same time that GOA was realising that even the mighty Warhammer license wasn't going fell Blizzard's champion, we left our Mammoth-mounted Stygian foundering in the bug-plagued desert of AOC's sparse mid-game content and abandoned him to the virtual abyss.

With the Free People of Middle-Earth rallying heroes to Moria, we didn't expect to return any time soon and in fact, it wouldn't have surprised us if at some point in the last year Hyboria was once more consigned to oblivion. But this Cimmerian is of hardy stock and Conan has proved remarkably durable through lean times under the watchful eye of Funcom.

With a nearly eighteen months between playtimes it's with a fresh perspective we return to the virtual incarnation of Robert E. Howard's brainchild. For Funcom it's been a protracted period of filling out what was sparse mid-game content, balancing, bug-crushing and population management. For us, entering the Rise Of The Godslayer beta is quite the eye-opener: our mid-range DirectX 9 system has since been transformed in to a high-end DirectX 10, power-hungry beast whose whopping 295GTX and over-clocked quad-core chows down wattage like popcorn at a film festival.