Recent reviews by OldManMercy

There's something to be said for leaping around as the Hulk, smashing up the bad guys. Or flying around as Thor or Iron Man, laying the smackdown to those deserving of it.
Personal Pros:
Gameplay very fun.
Main story? Excellent. I shed a single manly tear.
Voice acting is great.

Personal Cons:
Gameplay, while fun...is a bit repetitious. There's not a lot of endgame content. This is likely due to lack of funding. Which is likely due to many other outside variables, not all of which lie at the developer's feet.
Bugs that have been present since launch that while not gamebreaking, ARE very annoying. Workarounds are almost as bad as the bugs themselves. Again, lack of funds, I'd imagine, as well as the vicious circle that comes with such a situation.
Lack of playerbase (at least on Steam/PC version) make teaming up difficult at best. Top that off with no cross-platform game play and...well.....yeah.

Overall, I'd still recommend it. Get it on sale, play it occasionally, and you'll get your money's worth out of it, guaranteed.

Overall a very fun park sim. Don't have any of the DLC packs and I am satisfied with what I got for the price I paid.

Even if it's buggy as hell, it's still free DLC. For a SEVEN YEAR OLD GAME. What else can be said?

So, 350 hours in and I can say this game has so much potential. To see that the devs listen to the players is encouraging. New update brought us two servers. PvP and a hybrid server where only the top tier zones are PvP.

Crafting is coming along very nicely and I especially like that it matters what materials one uses to craft things. Low quality materials, low quality goods. High quality materials, high quality goods. Surprisingly, not many MMO's have this feature.

Still needs optimization, though.....but! I can totally believe it's coming.

TLDR: Good game. Still needs polish, but it's coming. Give it a try.

Edit:

Adding a caveat. Some members of the community in the game are very toxic and love to seal club and use the fact that it's an open world PvP game to justify their aberrant behavior.
This however, was solved by the two servers. Those people no longer have helpless victims that are horribly overmatched by their top tier ships and crews. Of course, now they blame the PvE crowd for ruining their game. Don't buy into it. THEY are the ones responsible for killing the game. (Although it's not quite dead yet and can be saved.)

Further Edit:

Bossa announced cancellation of the game due to lack of popularity. Oh, the irony. Add Bossa to the "do not support" list(sadly a growing list) of publishing companies to never buy from again. It's what I am doing.

As a huge fan of the Robert E. Howard books, I was overjoyed to know there was a Conan game coming out. Funcom? Who's that? They did what? Oh, okay. Skip forward to release of Age of Conan. Combat mechanics a bit wonky, but still innovative. Decent system. Graphics were lacking, and it seemed that every character face was just a slight variation of the one before it...which made the females resemble the males. Just....with mammary glands. Game turned out mediocre at best. Still going, but not sure how populated it is. Personally, I think Funcom fumbled the ball with that attempt at Conan the MMO.

Fast forward. I'm 50 now, and Funcom announces they're putting out another Conan game. I cringe inside, knowing the shambles they made of the previous attempt. Futilely I try to warn people, but nobody listens. I buy the game to see if I'm right, or if I'm way off base.

Turns out it's a little from column A, and a little from column B. It's fun and engaging game PLAY, but the story and actual mechanics of game play are utter tripe. One kind of attack, a dual slash for swords. Ditto blunt weapons. Different attack animation for two handers, but it's not really variation. I get it's early access, and there's room for improvement...but it's Funcom. Let's be real.


They used recycled graphic recources from their 2008 attempt at a Conan game to make character models that just....well, suck. Faces are just like before, blending into one another. No animation to them at all. Hell, other games with voip have facial animation when talking to add to realism. How much you wanna bet Funcom never updates the graphics and tries to shove an unfinished, buggy "release" down the throats of consumers with very little actual work done to the game itself.

TL : DR

Don't buy. Ever.



Full Release:

Yup. I was right. They did very little actual work to the game and released it. To be fair, FUNCOM /did/ improve combat vastly. And the building in the game is top notch. The game play remains fun and addictive, yet also STILL remains hampered by the dated appearance of the game. Perhaps it's just because I've not seen any improvements over the years to the character models Funcom uses that I have a dislike for the game, or perhaps it is the smear to Conan lore I grew up with that causes my negative review of the game. Still, I feel confident enough that if you DO end up purchasing this....you'll end up walking away strangely dissatisfied and satisfied at the same time.

The voice acting is nothing short of perfect. Incredible script writing makes the world come alive.

10/10, would shed manly tears again.

Horrible balance issues, despite being in an open beta for almost two years. Matchmaking is easily manipulated so people can seal club the new players and thus pump up their stats....developers making terrible decisions and alienating the player base on a daily basis......this game started out good when I first started playing in back in patch 1.26...but here in 1.43 it's a shambles. Gaijin is the only company I've seen that makes games more broken and worse with every patch.

Blatant grind designed to force the player into buying premium time, constant stealth nerfing of match rewards.....no. Best to wait for some other multiplayer war type game to come out.

Very limited character creation, poor chat system and the fact that you're not your own hero, but someone's sidekick make this a mediocre game at best.

The writing and story in this MMORPG is superb. Top notch. I loved the storyline and plot twists. Unfortunately, the game's difficulty level shot upward WAY too fast.

Read up on builds and synergies to no avail. The ONLY way I could progress was by "outleveling" the content....which shouldn't have been both possible and necessary.

Possible in the fact that the game touts "no levels"...which is true in a sense. You..the character have no level. YOUR GEAR DOES. If you don't have the very best gear(which takes an ungodly amount of grinding to get) you're not going to get very far.
Necessary in the fact that despite the advertised "create your own character"...if you don't have certain abilities and weapon sets, you're not going to be able to complete even the basic storyline.

The loot system is an archaic and terribad need/greed system.
Character models are clones of one another, with badly represented character models from Age of Conan copy/pasted over.
The grind starts early and doesn't let up.

No, what could've been a visionary and revolutionary game went the way of the dodo.

The best looking of the three Craptic titles so far, STO is still shatting upon childhood memories and butchering previously established lore and storylines al lin the name of profit.
The flagships of the televised series are so weak and pathetic that they are generally laughed at in both PvE and PvP content, and I'm certain the ONLY reason this game is still getting development resources is that CBS still owns the intellectual property and will pull the plug if Craptic ever pulls the same thing they did with Champions Online.

Craptic totally butchered the races and lore of the Star Trek universe...and continue to do so in the name of the almighty dollar. Why this company still exists is a mystery to me.