Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

The gear situation isn't improved by what must be Conan's biggest post-launch bug - the fact that most of the stats on your items don't actually do anything at the moment. You can stack up the Strength stat all you like, it won't make a second's difference to the damage you deal - a fix is apparently coming shortly, but this critical problem has persisted for a month already.

All of this said, a great many players won't find the game's sluggish character progression, or even that glaring bug, remotely as problematic as it should be on paper. Why? Because on a basic, moment to moment level, Age of Conan is fun. It's bloody good fun, with the emphasis on the bloody. And that's just enough to paper over the cracks.

The decision to take away the auto-attack function common to MMOs, replacing it with a range of melee attacks - all of which have an area of effect, rather than just hitting one targeted enemy - turns the basic combat experience upside-down. After playing melee classes in other MMORPGs, Age of Conan's are a revelation. With collision detection fully active and your sword swinging in arcs in front of you, positioning becomes absolutely vital to success in battle - and as your character evolves, increasingly complex combos require that you learn button press sequences in order to pull off devastating attacks quickly.

The result is a system that's fast and involving, and which manages to be challenging while generally remaining intuitive. Casting classes don't feel the love to quite the same extent, and remain a little more similar to their ilk in other MMOs - although they, too, get significantly more focus on area-of-effect spells. Even healers get in on the action, with the ability to spam area-of-effect healing spells. Besides, some of the game's more innovative magical classes are pretty effective in melee too - we especially like the Herald of Xotli, whose ability to transform into a raging, melee-combat-adept demon every couple of minutes is a pretty unique experience for any fan of squishy mage play.

On the class front, Funcom seems to have got most of the balance right from the outset. The developer continues to tweak all of the classes as it progresses, playing with abilities, talent trees and so on in each of its twice-weekly updates - but none of the classes can truly be described as "broken" at this point. They're all pretty fun to play, and the diversity of opinion about which classes are best tends to imply that no single class is standing out as being desperately over- or under-powered.

That's the thing about Conan right now. Every time you find something that's broken or annoying, you find a couple of things that work right, that feel good, and that more than counterbalance the problems. A huge and common complaint with the game is that the content thins out as you progress, and there is definitely a case to be answered here.

The number of levelling zones is actually very small - in fact, the world in Conan seems extremely small overall, compared to the sizes of other MMORPGs at launch - and at some points, the number of quests available seriously dries up. As a result, you can find yourself having to level up by mindless grind, not something an MMO should be asking its players to do in this day and age.

Funcom claims to be aware of the problem, and to be working to introduce new zones and tons of new quests in the near future - but this is stuff that should have been in the game on day one, not on day 30 or day 60, or later still. The fact that a number of quests are bugged or broken, thus rendering the rest of some lengthy quest chains totally inaccessible, certainly doesn't help.