Publisher: Funcom
Developer: Funcom
System requirements: Windows XP SP2/Vista/Win 7, 3.0 GHz Pentium IV or equivalent CPU, ATI Radeon 9800/Nvidia GeForce 6600 or better graphics card, 1 GB RAM, DirectX 9.0c/DirectX 10, DirectX-compatible sound card, 32 GB hard-drive space, broadband Internet connection
Genre: MMORPG
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

”Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!” So ended the introduction to Conan the Barbarian, the 1981 sword-and-sorcery film featuring author Robert E. Howard’s most famous character. Twenty-seven years later, developer Funcom released Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. And now, this MMO has been rebranded Age of Conan: Unchained (good timing, considering a Conan remake is headed to multiplexes this month). The difference? Now you don’t have to spend any gold, silver or tin to play it.

Unchained takes place in the violent, medieval world of Conan, but you can’t play as the musclebound King of Aquilonia. You play a slave who has miraculously survived drowning after his (or her) ship sinks near the remains of the lost city of Atlantis. You wash up on the beach of the island of Tortage with no memories. During the first 15 to 25 hours of gameplay, you complete quests that gradually help you remember your past, then you return to your home and begin to piece together the rest of your previous life.

Like most MMO’s, the most frustrating part of Unchained is the installation. I happened to have a previously uninstalled copy of Hyborian Adventures, so I decided to install from the disks instead of downloading the client. Yes, I said “disks” — two DVDs, installing 27 GB of data on my hard drive, with another 4 GB of patches to download. The entire process took almost three hours to complete. Character creation, on the other hand, is fast and simple: You choose from four races and 12 classes, customize your appearance (those choosing a female character can have their heroine almost completely naked; one of the reasons for the game’s totally deserved mature rating), and you’re ready to get started.

The world of Unchained is very easy to navigate. An annotated minimap in the top corner of the screen shows where you are and where your tracked quests are leading you. A larger version of the minimap can be displayed with a single click or button press, giving you a better perspective of your situation (all except for height; the developer who figures out a way to display map locations in all three dimensions should get an award for this achievement alone). Movement controls are standard MMO; WASD moves the character, holding down the right mouse button shifts the third-person camera. As for combat, Unchained includes an auto-targeting feature, with your character shifting to combat mode on his or her own. As you level, you unlock various abilities and combat styles that can be accessed through the hotkey bar at the bottom of the screen. Some of these are available only with a certain weapon type; you can switch easily between two weapon loadouts. The game has no normal day-night cycle. Instead, gameplay is divided by the time of day; single-player missions all happen at night, while quests that might require you to group with other players occur in daylight. Graphics are excellent but not pushing the state-of-the-art envelope. You have a choice of DirectX 9 or DX 10 graphics. Using DX 10, I noted framerates from 20 to 45 fps with a fast Internet connection at 1920 x 1200. Soundtrack music is very dramatic and loud (watch your volume settings), and it seems to be cribbing ever so gently from Basil Poledouris’s evocative 1981 movie score.

Unchained‘s biggest problem is it’s lack of originality. You’re still doing seemingly meaningless side quests to increase your XP so you can level (you need to progress to at least Level 20 to get off the starter island). Quests have you visiting and revisiting three locations until you are strong enough to face the area’s final boss, who resides on the single-player side of the game, so you’ll have to fight him on your own (fortunately, enemies don’t respawn on the night side). When you group, loot is available to everyone in the group, but immovable dialogue boxes appear in the center of the screen, asking you if you want or need certain loot items. This is a problem if you’re in the middle of combat at the time. Graphics artifacts are everywhere; you can see on the other side of some walls by standing next to them and rotating the camera, dead enemies can sometimes get stuck inside solid objects. Enemy AI isn’t very bright; you can be fighting someone standing near to a group of other enemies, but they rarely come to help their comrades. And as for the free-to-play model, Unchained has one of the most restrictive systems in FTP games. Certain dungeons are only accessible to paying subscribers. You get half the available item storage space, which makes you think carefully before you click the “loot all” button after a battle. There are only two FTP raids in the entire game, and you can’t participate in sieges. And you only get two of a possible 18 character slots.

I’ve spent about 25 hours with Age of Conan: Unchained, and so far I’ve enjoyed myself, despite the seemingly endless traipsing from one corner of the map to the other (mine is a warrior character, so no teleport spells for me), not being able to find a battle comrade when I really need one, the generally bad voice acting, the numerous graphics glitches and the distracting lag. It’s a pretty game, and a pretty violent game, too (much blood is spilled, sometimes in slow motion if you trigger a finishing move). But it’s free, which makes the problems sting a whole lot less.

Our Score:
Our Recommendation: