Conan: Exiles on PS4. What a broken mess this game is

So after finishing the main story on Tunic (more on that later) I am faced with clearing up the rest of the optional content in that game or moving on. I decided to do both. I was a massive fan of Conan in the 80's so I thought, what the hell I will give this game a shot.

It didn't take me very long before this game was deleted, forever, from my hard drive.

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The game started out pissing me off as it attempted to force me to login with some 3rd party horseshit in order to play, which I refuse to do and wish that Playstation would make as some sort of eliminating factor for anything they have on their platform. I already have a PS4 login, I don't want to sign up for some shitty other 3rd party garbage so they can sell off my personal information as well. Thankfully, you can still play the game in 1-player local mode without signing up because if that wasn't possible, I would have not even bothered to play the game at all which in retrospect might have been best.

The game does start out pretty good but unless you are as old as I am you might not appreciate the things that I did.

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The game starts you out left to die on a cross in the desert with some awesome ominous music playing that was very similar but not a direct lift of the iconic score from the original Arnie movie Conan the Barbarian. One of the things that you have to choose is a religion, and I was delighted to see that they had the two major religions from the original film in it as well. I of course, chose Arnold's religion of "Crom."

The cutscenes were a bit choppy but still gruesome and quite cool and I was looking forward to seeing what this game would provide. I was excited because I knew it was seriously open-world and a bit of a builder game. My hopes were dashed almost immediately once I was given control of the action though.

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You start your journey out with zero inventory and just have to wander into the distance and find stuff as well as build up skills in order to make clothing, weapons and tools, which is fair enough considering that moments ago you were left to die on a cross in the desert. But this is where things get REALLY REALLY BAD very quickly. How they managed to port this to PS4 when the system (or the software) is completely incapable of processing the graphics is just very poor on the part of the developers. There are times where the framerate dropped to just a couple frames per second and you would have difficulty even figuring out which direction you were moving or what you are looking at. I had a flashback to a time when my family PC computer as a pre-teen got Wing Commander installed on it even though I was too young to understand the limitations that a 386 with no graphics card would have on the game.

Conan simply crawled. It was obviously incapable of being played on this machine and there were several times that I fell off a cliff because I didn't know the cliff was even there because it was still processing the graphics of the plants I had to walk through on the ridge. I restarted my machine because I thought there was some sort of chance that I might have had something running in the background that was slowing things down but nope... according to thousands of online reviews this is just the way the game is and it apparently gets much much worse later on in the game when there is a lot going on at once and you are facing multiple enemies.

To make matters worse, this game appears to have been designed for someone playing with a mouse and keyboard as well as sitting 2 feet from a desktop monitor. There are hundreds of things in the menus that you have to peruse and the only way to access any of them, as is typical with a controller, is to scroll through all of them. This takes absolute ages even before you factor in the case that the game clearly wasn't optimized for console play, or at least not this particular console. The descriptions, which you really do need to read in order to get anything done in the game, is also written in 2 point font which is fine and dandy if you have the vision of a bald eagle, but for normal humans sitting on the sofa across the room, this is useless.

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So yeah, no problem, I'll just stand 3 feet from my 50 inch television so that I can figure out how to create a bedroll and a rock hammer.

Even resource gathering is a chore because there is this tiny little dot that indicates what you are looking at to perhaps interact with it and let me tell you, if that dot, which is almost not even visible, isn't point EXACTLY at that particular thing, you will not even have the option of picking it up. This is frustrating right from the start because you have to pick up tree branches that are small in comparison to everything else and lying in the sand. Not that it really matters though because unless you are willing to stand in the middle of your living room you are not going to know what the fuck you are supposed to do with them in the convoluted menu that honestly, has far too many options available on it.

Here's an idea guys! If something isn't going to be a factor for me until 20 hours of gameplay, how about not even having it in the menu just yet? Why bury what it is that I need to know in the middle of 275 other things on the same screen?

Building seems to be a big part of this game and I would be all about that, if it wasn't for the fact that simply placing my original bedroll and campfire was an exercise in rage-quitting anger. Just like any controller-based building game it is excruciatingly difficult to even see where the hell you are meant to put this thing and with a millimeter shift touch on the stick, your bedroll/campfire/whatever is now 100 meters in the distance and it won't let you put it that far away from where you are standing anyway.

I never made it very far into the game because this is just not a game that can be played on a PS4 IMO. When the framerate drops that low at the VERY START of the game and then you are thrust into a game with far too many options, how the hell is anyone even going to bother trying to get anywhere in this? After a fought a couple of bear-turtles or whatever the fuck they are and took down a couple of rather easy to defeat humans who forget you are there if you just run 15 meters into the bush, I learned that combat was pretty boring as well. I got as far as obtaining a bow and arrow but then it told me I have no ammo to use it even though there were dozens of arrows in my inventory. I would imagine that you have to load them up somewhere in the myriad of options in the convoluted menu, but at that point I had my fill and was tired of standing in the middle of the living room.

Stay away from this game on PS4. I get that it is free and that is great and all, but a free piece of doodoo is still going to be doodoo despite the lack of cost.

There is a massive thread dedicated to basically everyone stating the same thing that I just did and some people have suggested that you have to make certain adjustments in the settings to get the game to function. I'm not going to do that. If your product has to be stepped down in the setting to simply WORK on a certain console, then it shouldn't be released on that console, period.