Conan Exiles

Rule your thralls! Lay waste to enemies! Also, chop down trees.

There’s an abiding sense of familiarity to Conan Exiles. On the one hand, it’s a return to the lands of Hyboria for developer Funcom, which originally built out Robert E Howard’s low-fantasy world of barbarians, breasts and beasts for its 2008 MMOG Age Of Conan. It’s not exactly the same world – Exiles is set in a new location, the Exiled Lands, a land of desert and oases encircled by a boundary called the Cursewall. But it’s still a place of high peaks and monumental stone constructions, fit for rippling pecs and flashing swords.

On the other hand, there is a lot here that feels familiar, with remarkable similarities to Ark: Survival Evolved. It might lack dinosaurs to tame, farm and ride, but the resource gathering, crafting and building that underpins it, along with health, hunger and thirst management, are functionally identical. And then there’s the framing of the world: in Ark your character is fitted with a strange device implanted in one arm, while in Exiles your character wears a mysterious bracelet which, should you attempt to cross the Cursewall, will kill you.